The Grudge-- My take on the movie with spoilers!

PLOT SUMMARY: When a nurse brings back a curse from her trip, everyone who encounters it faces its wrath. 

When someone dies in a fit of extreme rage or sorrow, a curse is born in that place. Anyone who encounters it is haunted by that curse until their death. In these cases, the victims usually just kill themselves, unable to bear the horror that comes with the haunting.

An interesting premise, right? The original Japanese movie, even the 2004 version one, had elements that kept you glued to the screen.

What was scary about the movie was the freaky rattling sound emerging from the ghost’s throat. That’s the one thing that stood out. Yes, the visuals were there, but it was the sound that made your heart jump.

Coming to the 2020 version, and, spoiler alert, the movie falters miserably. Because here’s the thing, the movie doesn’t set up the story effectively, and we simply don’t see the ghosts that are haunting the victims. They just seem possessed and go on a killing spree before killing themselves.

At one point, one of the characters states that he cannot bear to look at the ghosts anymore and gouges his eyes out. Honestly, I just wanted to see a glimpse of what he saw that was so terrifying.

The other thing that didn’t work well was the fact that you were supposed to have seen the earlier movies to get the character references. Sixteen years is a long time to remember details, but this movie wants you to see the connections.

The Grudge could have been called anything else. Simply put, it didn’t merit the connection to the previous movies.

THE GRUDGE Movie Plot 

The movie begins with a nurse, Fiona Landers, in Tokyo, talking on the phone about going back to the States. This is 2004, in the same timeline as the Grudge. She receives a call from Yoko but ignores it when she sees the garbage bags moving.

Fiona is disturbed by what happened to her in the house. What could it be that freaked her out? No one knows. But somehow we have to make our own deductions. She sees a person moving around inside the trash bag, and her expressions show that she knows that it is a ghost haunting her.

Later, she arrives at her house at 44 Reyburn Drive. Somehow the name stuck with me because of what happens in the end. She greets her husband and daughter and then sees something that freaks her out.

In the next scene, we meet Detective Muldoon, a woman grieving her husband’s death. She is tasked with a new case of a woman’s remains found in a car. When she learns that this case might be related to the Landers family, she dismisses her partner’s advice to pursue the case.

She begins her investigation and we are shown another family, Peter and Nina, who were real estate agents. Peter was trying to sell the Landers house while Nina is coping with a difficult pregnancy where the doctor has informed her that her baby will be born with ALD.

Nevertheless, she decides to keep the child and informs Peter who has encountered Fiona’s daughter, Melinda, roaming around the house. She is bleeding profusely from her nose just behind Peter’s back. We have to assume something goes wrong and he is attacked because when Peter returns home, he kills Nina and drowns himself in the bathtub.

Now we know that Fiona had killed her daughter Melinda and her husband Sam.

Detective Muldoon digs deeper and finds an elderly couple who had moved into the house in 2005- Faith and Williams.

Faith suffers from dementia but she sees Melinda’s ghost which Williams makes to be a side effect of her disease and decides she’s too far gone and needs to die. He calls Lorna who refuses to fulfil Williams’ wishes because Faith isn’t in her right mind to say that she wants to die as well. She, however, decides to stay in the house and shop for them. But since she entered the house, the ghost of Sam haunts her everywhere.

Soon enough, Faith kills Williams, and Lorna runs for her life in her car but sees Sam’s ghost in the backseat. She swerves and crashes the car and is instantly killed.

In 2006, Detective Muldoon finds that her partner’s partner is in the asylum.

He keeps screaming about being haunted by ghosts and gouges his eyes out. We never get to see what he actually sees.

Muldoon makes her way to the house even after being warned not to and finds Faith still in the house with Williams’ corpse seated near the TV. Faith is taken to the asylum where she keeps seeing Melinda. She climbs the stairs and leaps to her death.

Muldoon is now scared for her life and her son Burke’s because she too entered the house. She starts seeing ghosts and confides in her partner that she was researching the case behind his back. He tells her another important part of the puzzle, that Fiona brought the curse with her from Tokyo and now it is consuming everyone who encounters it like a virus.

THE GRUDGE Ending Explained with Spoilers!

Muldoon decides the best way to get rid of the curse is to burn the house down. She enters and starts pouring gasoline everywhere while seeing scene by scene of what Fiona did to her family.

Just as she is about to light the match, she sees her son standing and asking what is going on. She tells him to repeat what happens when they are scared. When he doesn’t close his eyes and say the phrase, Muldoon realizes she’s being tricked and throws the match on the ground.

The house catches fire and burns down.

Later, Muldoon is sending her son to school and hugs him only to hear the real Burke saying he’s going to school. She realizes she’s hugging Melinda instead and is then dragged away.

The movie only serves to incite curiosity and delivers blah scenes. All the other Grudge movies showed the ghosts terrifying their victims. All we see in this one is a glimpse of the ghosts and mentions of the haunting.

And the absence of the creaking, rattling, throaty sound simply turned this into just another drama movie with lacklustre sequences.

Scare scale: 2/5