A dash of Twin Peaks can’t stop the rot
The Grudge 15 cert, 94 min
★★★★★
Dir Nicolas Pesce
Starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver, Betty Gilpin, Lin Shaye, Frankie Faison, William Sadler By Tim Robey
The makers of The Grudge, a fourth American spin-off from 2002’s Japanese horror hit of the same name, seem unaware of a nagging irony at their film’s core. The series is about a curse that won’t die, visited on anyone who steps inside the site of a terrible crime. A daisy chain of murder-suicides – unwittingly elongated by a pair of estate agents, who are struggling to shift the property – ensnares every character, and there seems to be no foolproof way of breaking this hex.
But we also just can’t be rid of The Grudge, a franchise which everyone assumed had died out with the direct-to-video The Grudge 3 in 2009. This new reboot (of sorts) sidles up like the return of a lingering bad smell, reminding you that there’s something nasty behind the wardrobe you really ought to sort out. It can’t deodorise the concept, though, or do anything very fresh, because the whole point of it is wedded to what came before.
The series always looked weak next to the Ring films, in either Japanese or American incarnations, but at least the non-linear writing offered some structural novelties: once again, we jump about in time here between a dozen or so characters whose intertwined fates are gradually explained. World-weary cop Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough, toughing it all out nicely) puts the pieces together, deducing a timeline of mysterious deaths across several years, all seeming to emanate from the same suburban mansion, 44 Reyburn Drive, in small-town Pennsylvania.
Something about that address might give you a frisson of David Lynch, and it’s no surprise that this film’s director, Nicolas Pesce (Piercing), names Lynch as an obsession. In homage, he has stalkery ghouls popping up on CCTV recordings and then vanishing when you rewind; disused service roads which are eerily straight and empty; and a number of performances that are Twin Peaksian in the extreme.
In flashback, Shaye’s Faith wants to end things, so her husband (Frankie Faison) hires assisted suicide specialist Lorna Moody to talk through their options – the weirdest thing about The Grudge is how many of these bleak scenarios it grafts irrelevantly on to the plot. One way or another, the various characters have quite enough on their plates without screeching black-haired wraiths invoking some mangy old curse to make them arbitrarily savage their loved ones.
Alas, as Pesce flits between the many cycling points of view, all logic goes haywire. Sometimes the spectres play peekaboo in baths where only we can see them; sometimes they hover inches from Shaye’s face; sometimes they thread blackened, disembodied fingers through Cho’s hair as he takes a shower. You never know where you are with the wretches – but there are also fewer and fewer reasons to give a damn.