The Grudge

Directed by Takashi Shimizu

Columbia Pictures

We hear only the high-pitched moan of the floorboards creaking as a woman’s shoes walk slowly across the floor: This space is completely dead, we see shoes, we hear floorboards—that’s it. The camera begins to pan ever so slowly across the floor; we hear nothing and only see the grainy, wooden expanse of floorboard, board after board laid perfectly side by side—sparse and chic turned ominous. The camera stumbles upon a door, it bursts open, the hand of the dying woman drops, a guttural boom blasts from the sub and that four-dollar bucket of flat Diet Coke resting patiently at your side becomes fizzy and fresh on your lap as you jump—hard.

It’s these moments—when some random horrific element comes from nowhere—that make the first act of The Grudge, Hollywood’s latest attempt at remaking a foreign blockbuster, extremely enjoyable. Yet tension gives way to torpor as the first act crawls to a close: The slow reserved pace that initially generates bloodcurdling moments soon begins to retard the motion of the film. It never picks up pace leaving the great horror movie moments without resonance at all: They are simply empty shocks. Even the supposed surprise ending becomes an “Oh, okay” moment instead of a “Wow, no way, that’s his father?” one.

The film features a so-so B-list cast with Sarah Michelle Gellar starring as Karen, the non-vampire-slaying, non-mystery-solving exchange student in Toyko, Bill Pullman as Peter, an ill-fated professor and Grace Zabriskie as Emma, an elderly woman who’s either a heavy heroin addict or a precog. Except for Zabriskie reinventing the doped-up old woman role, the rest of the cast disappoints—especially Gellar. Sure, she can wield a wooden stake, seduce her brother and spot Scooby Doo like no one else, but Gellar just can’t handle the role of horror heroine.

Takashi Shimizu, director of both the original Japanese release and the American remake, exhibits a deft hand in the film’s opening third, combining Ozu-like pacing and Hitchcockian suspense with images reminiscent of Thomas Struth’s Shinju-ku (Skyscrapers) series. Indeed, Shimizu’s Tokyo (like Struth’s Tokyo) is an infinitely complex urban cityscape where all the disparate, chaotic elements seem to coalesce in a single symbiotic moment.

And the plot plays with this notion by mixing folklore with the fantastic. When someone dies in a rage, sorrow lingers in the place they died, spawning undead creatures that will murder anyone that attempts to inhabit that space. Thus, one woman’s obsession with a university professor begets a grudge that will leave her and her murdered son undead, forever lurking in their old home killing anyone who tries to move in. Jumping back in time we see the murders of several innocent bystanders throughout the film as they all in some way become connected with the home.

We see this passive philosophical notion of our random interconnectedness perverted into a chilling precept of horror. Shimizu makes the most of this, generating tension and genuine terror with a slow, sweeping camera that seems to glide across the traditional Japanese interiors with neither rhyme nor reason; he uses frequent long takes with symbolic tableaux in the foreground and complex interactions occurring in the background. Shimizu takes this potent philosophical notion and maximizes it’s potential for a startling filmic effect; at least, for the first 30 minutes.

Although this effective introductory passage certainly intrigues the audience, the film never grasps the depths and subtleties of the themes it’s trying to provoke: It extends this air of sophistication and depth yet it never follows up on it. Bad performances all around and a reliance on an auterist aesthetic being able to triumph over a woefully shallow script are to blame here. Combine the long takes with middling actors giving painfully over-articulated performances and you have something of a mess. Set against the background of bold visual filmmaking and the near incoherent plot, the performances stand out—for their lack of skill.

The movie, then, becomes a woeful drudge of cinematic excess: It’s cool for the sake of cool.

—Bryant Jones

Woman, Thou Art Loosed

Directed by Michael Schultz