The Grudge Review

One of the highlights of the 2003 Toronto Film Festival was the chance to see Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On in a theater crowded with over nine hundred souls all itching for a good scare. They did not leave disappointed. Ju-On was one of the high points of the Japanese horror explosion of the late nineties and beginning of the twenty first century. It’s an atmospheric, creepy ride – a continual cycle of slow building tension and scream-out-loud payoff. When I heard that it had been picked up for a North American remake it was no great surprise, but when word got out that Evil Dead director Sam Raimi would be producing with the original director back behind the camera the remake jumped right up to the top of my anticipated films list.

And now The Grudge is here, bringing a string of questions with it. Does it live up to the original? Does the horror translate? Will it live up to the expectations created by the overwhelming success of The Ring, another Japanese horror remake? The answer to all of the above is yes and no.

A brief summary: At its core The Grudge is a haunted house story. It opens with a written prologue explaining that when a person dies in the grip of a powerful rage a curse is born. That curse lives on in the location of the original death and spreads among the living who come into contact with it, inevitably bringing about their deaths. The dead in this case are a mother (Kayako) and her six year old son (Toshio) both killed violently in their Tokyo home. The haunted living are a small group of American exchange students, foreign workers and university professors who all have the misfortune to come into contact with the house.

Shimizu learned his trade working with cult directors such as Hideo Nakata (The Ring) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure) and shares writers, producers and key crew with those two masters of their craft and it shows. Like Nakata and Kurosawa, Shimizu is of the ‘less-is-more’ school of horror. Key to Shimizu is tone, pacing and atmosphere. He understands that what the viewer imagines can be far more horrifying than what they actually see and so he doesn’t actually show you that much – he gives you just enough for your mind to pick up the images and run with them.

The story is told in an episodic time-fractured structure, each episode starting with a black screen and carrying the viewer through a small stretch of time showing how the characters come into contact with the house and, inevitably, how they meet their end at the hands of either Kayako or Toshio. In both the original and the remake the episodic nature of the film has led to complaints that there is no development of the living characters and those complaining have a point, while entirely missing a second point. Yes, we don’t see much of the living, this is true. But looking for a lot of the living entirely misses the point of the movie because this is purely and simply a film about the ghosts and their bloody vengeance.

So, first question. Does it live up to the original. For the most part, yes. Shimizu’s skill with mood and pacing is every bit as evident here as it was in the Japanese original and his jump shots invariably produce jumps and shrieks throughout the theater. Shimizu has taken elements from the first theatrical Ju-On film and fused them with elements from the preceding two straight to video editions of the story and, by the combining of some characters and outright removal of others, has created a film considerably more coherent than the original. Fans of the originals will be happy to see key scenes translated over and fans new to the Ju-On world should find this considerably easier to follow than they would the original theatrical release. On the down side the film is stricken with the oddly stilted dialogue that almost invariably comes from taking acting directions from someone who doesn’t speak the language and, though it’s a fairly petty issue, I was fairly shocked and dismayed when they revealed what actually happened to Toshio – a story element very deliberately left unanswered in the originals and one I was fairly certain would play a key element in Shimizu’s promised third Japanese entry in the series.

The next question – does the horror translate – is a little more difficult to answer simply because, thanks to having seen all of the Japanese Ju-On films a few times already, I knew exactly what was coming the large majority of the time and thus was very rarely shocked or surprised by the goings on. What I can say is that the mood of the film mirrored the original very closely, the crowd screamed at all the appropriate moments, and when new elements did crop up they certainly provoked a good jump or two out of me. There’s nothing particularly culture-specific in The Grudge and they do a good job of finding credible reasons to insert all these westerners into Tokyo, so, unlike The Ring, there is no major rewriting of concepts required. They did, however, make one structural change that I found puzzling and that I thought lessened the effect somewhat. In the remake the black screens that mark the borders between episodes are just that – black. There’s nothing on them. Which is fine, I suppose. But in the original the transition between episodes is marked by a black screen inscribed with a single name. The name marks the character who will die in the next segment of the film. My guess is that the names were removed from the remake out of fear that they would lower the suspense but their presence in the original actually works the other way around. When you know who is going to die, and roughly what sort of time frame you’re looking at before that happens, it builds a sense of edgy anticipation into the film. You catch yourself looking around corners, checking the entire screen, trying to guess where, when and how the vengeful ghosts will strike. It ratchets the tension up an extra notch and provides that much more release when Shimizu finally strikes.

Will it match The Ring? Well, it’s going to open large and it will deserve that initial success. It’s a good film and should benefit from positive word of mouth. I doubt, however, that it will have the staying power of The Ring. The Ring is effective because of the core relationship between mother and child – a sense of panic that is just as effective on second or third viewing as it is on the first. The Grudge, however, relies on shock and shock value, sadly, is subject to the law of diminished returns. It’s just not as frightening when you know what’s coming and since The Grudge is built purely around the shocks it stands to reason that it simply won’t generate near the repeat business of its cross-over predecessor.

In the final analysis I’d say that The Grudge is a good film – a strong seven or seven and a half – but not the classic that the original Ju-On was.