Keeping the wraith

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/01/2020 (2258 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To determine whether a horror movie can be considered serious, there’s a handy rule of thumb.

In the Friday the 13th movies, if a tragic death occurs, there are no emotional repercussions, except perhaps the screams of a heroine upon discovering a horribly mutilated victim. Many horror films take place in an emotional vacuum, the better to gratify the base-thrill instincts of a younger audience who didn’t come to the theatre to get bummed out.

On the other hand, a serious horror film — say, The Exorcist — acknowledges the psychic toll exacted by tragedy. If done right, the combination of horror and despair enhances the overall dread that permeates the film.

The Grudge, then, aspires to be a serious horror film, though it is based on a franchise that doesn’t always take itself too seriously. (The last instalment of the original Japanese Ju-on series — Sadako vs. Kayako — pitted the murderous spirit from The Grudge against the murderous spirit from the Ringu series.)

Writer-director Nicolas Pesce, who helmed the impressive serious-horror film The Eyes of My Mother (2016) has fashioned this chapter as a kind of anthology, with each story carrying its own dramatic kick:

• In the town of Cross River, Pa. (the film was primarily shot in Winnipeg and Selkirk), married real estate agents (John Cho and Betty Gilpin) are facing hard choices when they discover their expected baby will be born with dire medical issues.

• An old married couple (Frankie Faison and Lin Shaye) have a medical issue as well. She is dying, and her husband enlists the help of an assisted-suicide caregiver (Jacki Weaver) to ease her expected suffering.

• After the cancer death of her husband, a police detective (Andrea Riseborough) and her son arrive in Cross River to make a fresh start.

• Another police detective (William Sadler) suffers apparent post-traumatic stress after investigating a homicide that has claimed the lives of an entire family. The matriarch of the family, Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood), had just come back to North America after a visit to Japan, where she had the misfortune of entering the cursed abode in Suginami, the locus of the horror in the 2004 American version of The Grudge.

Each of these stories has a foundation for solid melodrama, which is how Pesce seeks to get the audience invested in each of these characters. Buying into their reality should be all the more unsettling when the unreal wraiths of the late Landers clan (including Winnipeg actor Dave Brown as Fiona’s messed-up hubby) come visiting these characters when they’re at their most vulnerable.

This approach doesn’t work as well as it should. You can’t fault the actors, who do their best to ground the supernatural hoohaw with actorly gravitas.

Riseborough is especially committed, as is Demián Bichir as her friend Goodman, a cop whose instincts have told him to stay well out of the cursed fixer-upper at 44 Reyburn Dr.

One issue is that the overall impact is diminished because there are so many stories and characters to follow.

Another problem is that, once Pesce gets us on board with these characters, he’s still obliged to subject them to the horror tropes of past Grudge movies — the phantom helping hand in the shower, the ghost tugging at the bedsheets, the blood-filled bathtub, the pop-up appearances of the screaming spectre and so on.

Only on a couple of occasions does the director deviate from the Grudge cookbook in meaningful ways, particularly in the final scene.

Serious is all very well. A little more invention would have also been nice.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing