The Grudge
The sight of Sarah Michelle Gellar running around "The Grudge" might stir thoughts of Naomi Watts doing the same thing in another so-so American remake of a Japanese horror film. But for better and worse (though mostly better), "The Grudge" is not "The Ring," despite the appearance in both of a hairy lass who really gets off on freaking people out.
"The Ring" had the better plot and the better actress; "The Grudge" has the better director, although why Takashi Shimizu would re-direct his own movie is a mystery. I guess it beats letting some Hollywood hack do it. Plus, he does better than poor George Sluzier, who turned his great 1988 thriller, "The Vanishing," into the schlocky 1993 Jeff Bridges vehicle.
This version of "The Grudge" more or less follows Shimizu's original. Takako Fuji and Yuya Ozeki reprise their roles from the string of Japanese movies, playing a dead mother and her equally dead son who terrorize anyone who enters the house in which they died. There are some hard-to-decipher new developments at the end (courtesy of screenwriter Stephen Susco), a lot more American people, and twice as many Internet searches.
Gellar stars as Karen, a nursing student who joins her boyfriend (Jason Behr) in Tokyo while he pursues a fellowship. When, for some reason, one of her co-workers doesn't show up at the care-giving program where she volunteers (the girl was dragged up though the ceiling), Karen is asked to make her first solo house call. Her patient is a catatonic American, played by Grace Zabriskie, whose joyless eyes always portend doom and whose home is a mess. Karen starts cleaning up and discovers a taped-up closet that contains the boy, a book, and the obligatory black cat. A few minutes later, she sees something else that leaves her catatonic, too: The ghost that needs a haircut.
"The Grudge" takes a leaf from the "Psycho" handbook and abandons its star for stretches here and there. While Gellar remains crouching and inert, we're taken back to when Zabriskie's character moved into the house with her son (William Mapother) and his wife (Clea DuVall). While he's out being a businessman, the little lady stays home baby-sitting her mother-in-law and trying to find out who knocked over her ramen. She gets an answer and winds up a shivering mess.
The movie's supernatural themes aside, not much in "The Grudge" bears any relation to what you or I might do if we saw a darling little boy with an ashen face scurrying around the house. I'd call Ghostbusters; Gellar and DuVall do an exasperating amount of snooping, and not very expressively, I might add. I'm an admirer of the haunted atmosphere Shimizu gives the movie, but is it necessary for the whole cast to look as if it's seen a ghost before it actually has? By the time Bill Pullman shows up in the latter going, you're excited to see an actor who might use an inflection or end a sentence with something other than a question mark.
The trouble with Shimizu's impressionistic approach is that it doesn't entrench you deep enough inside anybody's head or put you far enough behind anyone's point of view for the scares to really work. Like his original, the movie consists of a bunch of scenes that contain weird images that seem too desperate to produce a legitimate shock. This is a horror freak-out in principle only.
But there are some decent amusements. For one thing, the movie feels like a salvo against the recent string of American Japonophila. Karen and boyfriend could be reenacting the beginning of "Lost in Translation," with the movie turning into a bloody disinvitation to tourists. For another, Gellar, who often looks baffled, seems content to take her "Scooby-Doo" training to the max. This does not excite me for the inevitable "Grudge 2," but it does make me curious about the likelihood of "Scary Movie 4."
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
Video
