Director: Nicolas Pesce
Writer: Nicolas Pesce
Starring: Andrea Riseborough, John Cho, Demián Bichir
Whether in its original Japanese incarnation Ju-On or in its Americanized form, The Grudge has always been a solid-enough concept in an everlasting search for a worthy movie, with iterations ranging in quality from merely dull to truly dire. The series is an icon of J-Horror without any greatness to its name, unlike its closest cousin The Ring, and this latest English-language entry, despite some valiant effort, does not change that. However, if there’s anything genuinely fascinating or enthralling about this otherwise poorly-assembled and dreary horror flick, it can be found in the distinctive signature of director Nicolas Pesce.
With his debut feature, The Eyes of My Mother, Pesce demonstrated a confident hand in dealing with matters insidious and grotesque, while his sophomore effort, Piercing, demonstrated a twisted sense of humor and an overt fondness for Italian horror cinema of the late 70s and early 80s. These qualities bleed into his version of The Grudge. He’s not simply tried to emulate the chilly tenets of J-Horror; instead, he’s made something that does, to a degree, feels closer to his own dark sensibilities and of those aforementioned Italian horror pictures, as he turns to Fulci and Bava for inspiration as opposed to Nakata or Shimizu. Through these unique touchstones, you can see a far more interesting vision of terror that appears to have been regrettably exsanguinated and softened in a bid to make it conform to something more conventional and, frankly, boring.
Considering this is ultimately a studio franchise play, Pesce has constructed an impressively grim film, both visually and emotionally. He and cinematographer Zachary Geller ensure every frame, many of which are quite striking in their discolored way, appears sick, mottled with greens and blacks, purifying like dead sodden flesh, and the tone features very little in the way of relief as the story unfurls its layers of despair and grief and violence like a corpse flower, enhanced by an oppressive score courtesy of the Newton Brothers that’s the ideal accompaniment to the grime and the filth of the visuals.
It’s also decidedly nasty, even cruel, in the misfortune it inflicts on its characters. There’s a plethora of nauseating imagery that draws a discomfiting power from violence that’s almost gorgeous in its grotesquery, very much like images from Fulci’s films, and something you wouldn’t find in any of the Japanese tellings of this tale. It’s not purposeless or cheap however, as certain explosions of gore, particularly vicious mistreatments of the flesh are effective in conveying the full extent of the vicious, bloody-minded rage of this series’ unique curse. The infliction of violence on the human body is not an insignificant or sanitized thing in a Nicolas Pesce film.
However, his film shares the most common flaw of his Italian horror touchstones: a narrative whose lack of character and cohesion causes the film to atrophy into monotony long before the credits roll. The Grudge inexplicably holds fast to the original film’s conceit of a set of interweaving story-lines bound together by a single location, a site of intense trauma, and it sinks this films as it has sunk its predecessors. It’s an interesting enough conceit but one that has proven seriously tricky to wrap a narrative around since it engenders a fragmented structure that essentially boils the whole film down to a series of vaguely-linked vignettes, which the editing jumps between at aggravatingly arbitrary points, creating a disorienting sense of randomness that’s certainly not intentional. As it progresses, the film doesn’t draw these strands together or uses their individual momentum or revelations to inform the other strands – they’re simply entangled like hair in a drain.
None of the four plot threads in this latest Grudge are terribly engaging because they haven’t any time to breathe, to develop, to gather some kind of emotional significance to them, despite a stellar cast, from which Andrea Riseborough stands out; she’s an actor uniquely gifted in grounding the surreal and the strange in something certifiably human. Still, these plots don’t work as engaging horror narratives in their own right; they are populated universally by thin personalities – our main character, Muldoon (Riseborough) possesses no first name, which tells you everything you need to know about the film’s writing – going through the most stale kind of hauntings and descents into madness, and they have no chance to grow more complex or interesting since the nature of the storytelling is so fractured, and unable to build any emotional cohesion or forward momentum. The absence of personal stakes or threat is a serious problem where the only reason to fear for anyone is their inevitable death; indeed, the inevitability of it, one which the narrative is predicated, just makes things feel episodic and dull.
The real failing, is that these smaller tales are not improved by virtue of being pieces of a larger whole; there’s no fuller picture, despite the film straining to find one. There seems to be an intention of addressing the horrific agony of grief and loss, but they wind up as little more than some extremely dark ideas reduced to simple window dressing by the wafer-thin plot. It has the feel of a film that’s been ruthlessly edited for the worse; sure, there’s no fat, but there’s also no flavor. It’s the barest scintilla of a story deserving of more.
And as much as I praised Pesce’s approach to the film’s aesthetic and atmosphere of decay, such plaudits come with the massive caveat that those effective elements are the exceptions to the rule. Much of the film’s scares arise from cheap jolts and sudden editing tricks that come and go with a dismaying predictability. Aside from being lazy, there’s the fact that these more standard horror sequences are just filler, not contributing in any meaningful way to the film as a whole or informing us of our characters’ slipping sanities. They just happen to make sure you’re still paying attention. And it’s a shame, because the thin silvers of Pesce’s idiosyncrasies and deliciously twisted mind that can be glimpsed through the melange of blandness demonstrate that he could easily be one of the genre’s most significant new voices, up there with Peele and Aster, if only he could escape the curse of working for a major studio.
The Friday Night Cinema Club 