Reviewed by Tim Wong

WHEN IN DOUBT, hide under the covers.

It's this most irrational of rationale that punctuates Takashi Shimizu's domesticated genre-horror, The Grudge (aka Juon): on second viewing, totally absurdist, yet as an initial, unexpected encounter of the lights-out variety, utterly pant-wetting.


What exactly compels a person to pull sheets over their head and hope that "it" will just go away? Not intelligence, surely. Similarly, Shimizu clearly works to idiot-proof mechanisms, quite content to push our buttons through the familiarity of playbook shock tactics, audio-terror and chronic character stupidity; this includes the obvious, such as ignoring the nearest exit point or making like an elderly snail under the impending death-gaze of a contortionist she-devil. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, this certainly isn't.

Why The Grudge works then as a genuine, elemental frightener isn't because of what it acknowledges, but what it doesn't. If ever there was a time for ambiguity to come back in style, this is it – and no, even David Lynch won't have the answers to this mildly nonsensical tale of murder, resentment and very little exposition. Told in six related, out of sync stories, "The Grudge" in this film is apparently one "in the grip of a powerful rage", or: suburban husband bludgeons unfaithful wife, illegitimate child and innocent pet cat to death. Future residents and visitors to the home of this ghastly deed are then, more or less, screwed. So like a nasty sting of scorned fatalism, six or more characters come, and then go, the most memorable of which sees the prissy, slightly moronic Hitomi seek refuge under the relative safety of her futon covers, only for the boogie [wo]man to materialise beneath her sheets, and the rest they say is...

Laugh as they might, there's something inherently real about responding to high-anxiety with the infancy of a small child. This is exactly the phenomenon of Asian horror – or more accurately, Japanese horror – which generates an almost primeval fear out of the intangible as opposed to another psychotic in a face mask with a sharp object. And Shimizu's fear is more abstract than most, including Hideo Nakata's Ring, which bottled it all into the physical form of a VHS tape. At least in that film, there was a means of avoiding the curse, yet in The Grudge, the evil is near-omnipresent, simply initiated by the slightest of contact with the house or its occupants. And unlike Ring, with its Nancy Drew ambitions of solving the mystery and presenting us, the viewer, with a nicely conceptualised resolution, Shimizu's film does little to nothing of the sort, the only form of justification for all this supernatural terrorism coming from a bizarro ending that really makes no sense whatsoever.

As inexcusable and un-movie-like as this might seem, it's the notion of the "unknown" that makes the film as scary as it is. It's also derivative of the curse-genre, which is especially good at making death a highly contagious thing. Ring, of course, made something out of the epidemic of piracy and rampant bootlegging, turning its curse into a self-multiplying analog virus for the pre-DVD generation. Most interesting then is that The Grudge is a former low-budget/low-grade video nasty itself (this being a cinematic update), of which through notoriety transforms even the act of viewing into a potential nightmare-athon. The film is actually part of the cycle – a mutation of the Ring cult – only a bastardised version, of sorts. So whereas Nakata's film conceived Sadako, Shimizu's gives birth to an entire family of avenging anomalies, personified by the diminutive, evil-eyed Toshio; this filmmaker's answer to Damien or Linda Blair. Comparisons aside, this is literally and figuratively a foreign object, the film's grasp on the inexplicit first luring us with bated curiosity, then snaring us through smothering fear. It might seem ridiculous, but when caught up in the moment, makes even reaching for the covers a plausible alternative.