Review: Ju-on: The Grudge

By kevin on October 11, 2006 at 7:12am EDT

I guess with quality real estate at such a premium in Japan a few dozen deaths all related to one residence just isn’t as much of a deal-breaker as one would think. Ju-on: The Grudge is a theatrical release set a few years after the events of the original . The Saeki house now has new residents for the ghosts of Kayako and Toshio to terrorize and director Takashi Shimizu now has a nice big budget to work with. Does that necessarily mean this Ju-on is a huge improvement over its low-budget predecessor? Not really, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a quality horror flick in its own right with a few really good scares in its arsenal.

The movie begins with a social worker named Rika (Megumi Okina) being assigned the task of checking up on an old woman (Chikako Isomura). When she arrives at the house she finds the woman, who’s obviously incapable of taking care of herself, left all alone with her family nowhere to be found. She’s completely unresponsive and the house is a total mess. Rika hears odd noises upstairs which lead her to find a little boy (Yuya Ozeki) in a closet that’s been completely sealed up with packing tape. He says his name is Toshio and she recognizes him from a crumpled up family photo she found when she arrived. She goes back downstairs to check on the old woman and finds her sitting up in bed muttering incoherently and staring straight ahead. Rika keeps looking over, somehow sensing something is there with them. Eventually she’s proven right and what she sees causes her to faint.

Much like the original Ju-on, this version is set up in chapters. This time, however, the overlapping of the chapters is much more complex. It takes a little bit of concentration to figure out when you’re going forward in time and when you’re going backward. At certain points you’re given hints that explain what happened to a certain character before that person’s chapter even comes up. It’s pretty clever and makes for a more interesting movie, but it’s really easy to miss important information or think certain details are completely pointless when they’re really not. I think this film has been unfairly pummeled for having plot holes, partly due to Shimizu’s habit of incorporating things from past movies and partly due to the way info is disseminated out of order. Aside from the obligatory gaps in basic common sense all the information is there. It’s just really hard to keep track of, especially if you have trouble remembering names.

In keeping with that confusion-factor, the next chapter is set right before the first chapter. We now see the old woman living with her son and daughter-in-law, Katsuya (Kanji Tsuda) and Kazumi (Shuri Matsuda). Oddly, they’re not the family from the photograph Rika will later find and they don’t have any kids. When Katsuya leaves for work one day Kazumi is awoken by a cup being knocked over. At first she thinks it was her mother-in-law, but it soon becomes clear they’re not alone in the house.

The rest of the movie continues much in the same manner, shifting between the present and the past storylines and weaving them together. Everything seems to revolve around Rika though, as she’s involved in many of the chapters to varying degrees. Having a “main character” was sort of a new idea for the series. In the V-cinema Ju-on films people were killed off pretty quickly and you never really got a chance to know them, surviving only in the confines of their own designated chapters. While having a particular character survive for the audience to follow and identify with throughout is probably a more traditional way to go for a major theatrical release it kind of takes the teeth out of some of the scares. In a way it makes the appearances of Kayako and Toshio more creepy and psychological than downright terrifying. Don’t get me wrong though; there are a few really intense scenes where bit characters get ghost-whacked in unique and clever ways. It just seems like at times too much thought was put into gearing this film toward teenagers, concentrating more on innocuous nail-biting suspense than sheer terror or shock. There’s no big memorable moment in this one that really sticks with you. Instead, there are a ton of minor moments that, while cleverly done, are not extremely scary.

“Ju-on” is a perfectly passable horror film that succeeds in re-initializing the Ju-on series for a wider audience. The story is really well-done considering the very basic main premise it’s built on. Unfortunately it seems as though some of the best qualities of the original were muted in the interest of profitability. If you’re looking for a good ghost flick you could certainly do a lot worse than this though. Even given its flaws Ju-on is still required viewing in the genre.