The Grudge

Year: 2004 Rating: PG-13 Overall Evaluation: 5.0 Significance Suppositions Story Style 3.0 / 10 6.0 / 10 5.0 / 10 9.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, disturbing images/terror/violence, and some (very minor) sensuality. Amazingly, without cussing, drugs, illicit sex, or nude teenagers getting their limbs hacked off this movie manages to be extremely scary (in the jump out and go "boo!" / gross-out sense more than the deeper terror of classic horror films). Hollywood could learn something from this!

Story

The story concerns a "haunted house" in Japan that is indwelt by spirits ("Ju-ons") of a family that was brutally murdered by the husband of the house before he killed himself as well. The movie picks up when new owners of the house are being terrorized by these spirits. The "heroine" (I put this in quotes because the story does not really follow the standard form) of the story is a girl that was sent to the home to take care of an elderly woman who witnesses a murder by the spirits and is now being terrorized herself.

[SPOILER WARNING!]

Unfortunately there is no way to escape these spirits. They can travel anywhere and basically do not seem to care about guilt or innocence - they are simply the leftovers of the terror that happened there and so go around causing terror to anyone who enters the home. At the end when we are led to believe the "heroine" escapes and destroys the house and spirits we find that she has not been successful.

Suppositions

As far as horror movies go there is nothing terribly unbelievable about the film. The problem is that we are dealing with Japanese superstition that does not sit well with the "western" mindset. I argue that it does not sit well with reality either. Beyond the particular issue of "spirits of violence" coming to exist because of a physical act (that is a given we can allow the genre), the idea that these spirits simply terrorize for no other reason than "that is just what they do" is extremely unsatisfying. This is not merely an eastern vs. western stylistic issue. Rather it flies in the face of a world where effects have causes. Some argue that the Ju-on spirits are not personal - thus maybe we should look at them more like earthquakes or lightning. But the fact of the matter is that the spirits are depicted as persons with emotion and will (if not intellect). If the movie was supposed to be about impersonal forces then that is how they should have been portrayed.

Significance

The message the movie sends is basically fatalistic. There's nothing you can do to either appease or fight the spirits because they are practically all-powerful while at the same time impersonal and therefore impervious to reason. So, tough luck - wrong place at the wrong time and now you die a horrible death for no reason. There is nothing you could have done to keep it from beginning and there is nothing you can do to stop it from continuing. Better luck next life.