The Grudge

In January 2020, Screen Gems released the fourth English-language entry in the Ju-On line and the first to hand the material to an American director with an art-house reputation. Nicolas Pesce, whose The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing had drawn notice for their cold, precise unpleasantness, wrote the screenplay with Jeff Buhler and shot the film in Winnipeg, Manitoba, standing in for an unnamed American town. Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert returned as producers through Ghost House Pictures, the banner behind the 2004 remake, and Takashi Shimizu received a credit for the characters he created in 2000.

The premise stays close to Shimizu's design. A death suffered in extreme rage leaves a residue in the place where it happened, and that residue attaches itself to anyone who enters. Pesce's variation is structural: rather than a single haunting, the film braids three households across roughly three years, with a newly arrived detective, played by Andrea Riseborough, as the thread that eventually pulls them together. Demián Bichir is her older partner, John Cho and Betty Gilpin are a couple trying to sell the house, Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison are an elderly pair living in it, and Jacki Weaver appears as a caregiver with unorthodox ideas about dying.

Critics were not kind. The film's Rotten Tomatoes score settled near 20 percent, and the recurring complaints were tangled chronology and a humorless, airless mood. Riseborough's performance drew the few kind notices. Against a $10 million budget it returned about $49.5 million worldwide, enough to avoid disaster and not enough to suggest the series had found a new direction. [edit]

Detective Muldoon arrives at the police department of a small American town with her young son, Burke, in tow. Her husband has died recently, and the job is a fresh start of the sort that rarely turns out to be one. On her first day she and her partner, Detective Goodman, are sent to a rural road where a car has been found with a body inside. The dead woman is Fiona Landers, a nurse who had been working in Tokyo. Muldoon notices a house near the scene and asks about it. Goodman tells her, in the manner of a man who has rehearsed the answer, that the case is closed and the house is not her concern.

The film then steps backward and sideways, into chapters that do not announce how they connect. Peter Spencer is a real estate agent trying to move the house, and his wife Nina is pregnant. Their section begins with domestic strain and ends somewhere much worse, though the film is in no hurry to say how the two states relate. Faith Matheson is dying of cancer in considerable pain, tended by her husband William and by a caregiver named Lorna Moody, who speaks of helping the terminally ill cross over and whose bedside manner is not entirely reassuring. Faith hears things in the house. The film treats her certainty as a reasonable response to her circumstances and then declines to let her be wrong.

Fiona's chapter carries the story back to Japan. She worked in a Tokyo care facility and visited a house that viewers of the earlier films will recognize, and she brought something home with her. What happens to her family follows, and the film's opening corpse turns out to be the end of a chain rather than the start of one. The curse, in Pesce's version, is portable. It does not require a particular address. It requires a person who has been inside the house and then goes somewhere else.

Muldoon keeps pulling at the case. She visits the house, speaks to neighbors, and begins to assemble a timeline that the film has been showing her in fragments. Goodman's evasions start to look less like departmental habit and more like fear. Her son Burke, meanwhile, is a small child in a new town with a mother working long hours, and the film uses him sparingly, which is the correct instinct and also the source of its eventual cruelty. The chapters accumulate their dead, and Muldoon's investigation narrows toward the realization that the house is not a place where something happened but a thing that has been passed from hand to hand, and that the passing is not finished.[edit]