Review: The Grudge is a routine horror film that follows a bad routine – San Francisco Chronicle

A scene from Screen Gems The Grudge. Photo: Allen Fraser, Sony Pictures

The holidays are over. The fun is over. The year has begun, and were all back to work and back to horror movies like The Grudge.

Written and directed by Nicolas Pesce, The Grudge is based on a 2002 Japanese horror film from Takashi Shimizu, but loosely. (Not the 2004 film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.) The new movie takes only the horror premise of the earlier film. There is a house. Bad things have happened in this house: murders. And anyone who walks into the house becomes cursed and then followed by the ravenous, vengeful ghosts of the victims.

Horror movies often have one of two problems. The Grudge has both.

The first problem of horror is that its often all premise and no development, just a repetition of the same idea. Theres a guy killing people on Valentines Day. Theres a guy killing people on Halloween. Theres a guy killing people on Christmas. In every case, the moment that you, as the viewer, start to think, Yes, and so what? What do I care? the movie crumbles. Theres never an answer to that question.

True, sometimes if the premise is really interesting, and its handled well, that can be enough. For example: There are monsters with bad vision and good hearing that will kill any person who makes a sound. That worked well for A Quiet Place. But most of the time, a horror movie needs more than one idea.

Second, horror films tend to set up situations that are so utterly hopeless, so without a possible way out, so inexorable and so doom-filled that they get boring. If theres no hope, if theres no course of action for the characters to take, if all we see are luckless victims, then there really isnt much for us to watch, at least not past the first 15 minutes.

The Grudge further mutes its already challenged effectiveness by taking place in three time periods, featuring three sets of victims. In 2004, an American woman (Tara Westwood) leaves a creepy house in Japan, where human hands mysteriously are springing from trash bags and grabbing at her ankles. They dont want her to leave.

Then theres Andrea Riseborough (always watchable, even in this) as a widowed young mother, starting a new job (in 2006) as a police detective in a new town. She finds out from her partner (Demian Bichir) about an unsolved case, involving a certain house on Reyburn Drive, and before you can say, Dont go there, she goes there.

In between, in 2005, theres a pair of real estate agents (John Cho and Betty Gilpin) attempting to sell the house on Reyburn Drive, which also means going there, though thats not a good idea.

Though Riseborough ultimately emerges as the first among equals, the focus of The Grudge is diffused among these characters and several more, so that each action is pretty much repeated over and over: Someone goes to the house, and from then on, they start seeing ghastly sights. Bloody hands clawing at their head. A decomposed face with flies coming out of its mouth. They become increasingly tormented, each in the same way, and it just gets old.

Horror movies are never more desperate than when they try to hold your attention with the threat of showing you something really disgusting. I saw this movie in the middle of the day, having had a great nights sleep, and I had to slap myself awake a few times.

By the way, have you ever noticed that, whenever someone in a movie says that they quit smoking, they always go back to smoking long before the end of the movie? The stress always, always gets to them even when the audience isnt stressed at all.

KThe Grudge: Horror. Starring Andrea Riseborough and Demian Bichir. Directed by Nicolas Pesce. Theaters and Showtimes. (R. 93 minutes.)

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Review: The Grudge is a routine horror film that follows a bad routine - San Francisco Chronicle

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero