Ju-On: The Grudge Movie Review:


An anthology horror film with interlinked characters, writer-director Shimizu is drawing on the same Japanese traditions as Nakata's Ring series with this haunted house tale. Rika (Okina) is a social worker who makes a series of freaky discoveries when she makes a home visit, including the appearance of a mysterious little boy (Toshio) and a ghostly grey woman (Fuji) who seems to suck the life out of people ... when she's not scaring them into catatonia. In the film's other chapters, which we see out of sequence, we meet the perplexed sister (Ito) of the home's owner, a teenager (Uehara) tormented by three missing friends, a man (Tanaka) who has a tormented history with this house, and a cop (Inoue) trying to make sense of it all.

Shimizu packs the film with images and sequences that are specifically designed to creep us out: eerie music, creaks and scratching, general untidiness, black cats and a sinister use of light and shadow. There are also rather a lot of things that feel lifted directly from The Ring, including the use of videotape, photos and television, unnatural children and women with hair hanging in their faces. The result is indeed unsettling, but it's also fragmented and repetitive, and badly overacted by the almost hilariously bug-eyed cast.

On the other hand, the notion that evil can spread like a virus is a very clever one. It's all about how our anger lives on after we die, infecting people and places that encounter it. This concept makes the film intriguingly creepy, even though it never builds up any overall tension as it shifts from one story to the next--there's no general narrative drive, no real mystery to solve, no deadline to race toward, no urgency and, frankly, no hope!

By the way, this is Shimizu's third of five films about this mythology--the first two were made for video, then this one and its sequel, and now an American version due out later this year. All feature the same mother-son characters played by Fuji and Ozeki.

Rich Cline

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