“The Grudge,” a 2004 American film directed by Takashi Shimizu as an adaptation of his own 2002 masterpiece “Ju-On: The Grudge” (which is Japanese), is a very good horror movie. It has scary and iconic villains, a genuinely disturbing backstory, fine performances and a consistently creepy atmosphere. I highly recommend it… but, unlike many other fans of the American version of “The Grudge” series, I think “The Grudge 2” is the best installment.
Shimizu resumes his duties as director here and is once again joined by the original film’s screenwriter, Stephen Susco. “The Grudge” star Sarah Michelle Gellar also briefly returns as Karen Davis, the sole major character to survive that picture, but she is not the main protagonist this time around. First there is Allison (Arielle Kebbel), an American exchange student from Chicago who is bullied by two classmates at Tokyo International School into entering a haunted house. A parallel plot focuses on Karen’s estranged sister Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn), who is sent to Tokyo from Pasadena by their ailing mother to bring her back to the United States. Finally there is a young boy in Chicago named Jake (Matthew Knight), who notices that his father and stepmother begin experiencing marital problems at the same time that an ominous hooded stranger moves into their apartment building.
All three of these seemingly unrelated stories are connected, of course, by that Japanese haunted house, where in “The Grudge” we learned that a woman named Kayako Saeki (Takako Fuji) and her son Toshio Saeki (Ohga Tanaka and Yuya Ozeki) were brutally murdered by Kayako’s husband Takeo (Takashi Matsuyama) after learning that his wife was infatuated with another man. In “The Grudge” universe, acts of horrible violence caused by an intense rage can curse the locations where they happened, literally spreading the misery through the ghosts of the initial victims — in this case, Kayako and Toshio.
I won’t spoil how the Allison, Aubrey and Jake storylines intersect with the haunted house, except to point out that “The Grudge 2” is smart enough to not have those intersections be random. If the murderous ghosts of Kayako and Toshio can be perceived as metaphors for the ways that trauma causes ripple effects of pain which last long after the initial events themselves — and this interpretation is hardly a stretch — then it is telling that each major character they torment is experiencing unrelated traumas in their own lives. They have family problems, feel isolated as they wander through foreign lands, experience cruel social rejection and regularly have their characters wrongly challenged. They are trauma victims long before they meet Kayako and Toshio; it just so happens that their more mundane fears evolve into supernatural ones after they are exposed to the curse.
This subtext wouldn’t be nearly as effective if the film itself wasn’t scary, but the frights in “The Grudge 2” are easily on par with the best from the original entry or the “Ju-On” series. There are many jump scares, which can be the downfall of a lesser horror flick, but here are skilfully crafted, used sparingly and sprung upon the audience only after the right amount of tension and suspense has been built up. Kayako and Toshio are also extremely disturbing characters in their own right, making croaking and cat-like noises as they pounce upon or engulf their victims. There is little gore here, with Shimizu wisely focusing on mining psychological fears rather than visceral ones.
The non-linear timeline is particularly crucial to the movie’s success. While a lesser film would use it as a gimmick, “The Grudge 2” employs this approach to (a) allow for plot twists that would otherwise be impossible if the story was directly told from start to finish and (b) illustrate how the narratives are offshoots from the initial trauma that occurred at the Saeki house. That event is the sun and every character who comes into contact with its traumatic aftermath, directly or indirectly, is a celestial body revolving around it. This is a difficult concept to effectively commit to celluloid, but Shimizu pulls it off.
Why do I like this better than the first film? The original shared the strengths of its successor, but there is something intangibly better about how they are executed in the sequel. This is one of those occasions where a critic can’t quite put his finger on why one work of art is superior to another. There are ephemeral, indefinable qualities that impact these considerations, and such is the case here.
Either way, if you’re in the mood for a good scary movie — one that mixes old-fashioned frights with a novel storytelling approach — you need look no further than “The Grudge 2.”
Update from December 28, 2021: I learned on this night that a trilogy of short films called “Tales from the Grudge” preceded the theatrical release of “The Grudge 2.” Since I want to say I’ve reviewed the entire American version of the Ju-On franchise (I simply lack the time to be a completionist with the Japanese canon), I watched those three short movies. I am happy to say that they are every bit as good as “The Grudge 2” itself! Although they don’t contain any characters from the other stories in the series (except for Kayako, of course), it takes place in the same universe and follows the same rules. I can’t go into further detail without including spoilers, but I will add this one observation: If you have a thing about hair getting stuck in your throat, it will creep you out on a whole other level!