94 min | R | January 3, 2020 | Screen Gems
A cursed house collects the dead across years, families, and detectives, and the curse spreads to anyone who steps inside. Andrea Riseborough leads a loaded cast straight into the rot. The house takes everyone and the movie keeps nothing.
Detective Muldoon arrives in a small town and catches a case that leads her to 44 Reyburn Drive. A woman died there. So did her family. The Grudge resets the American franchise around a curse that spreads through a single house and infects everyone who enters it. Nicolas Pesce frames the story as a police procedural haunted by its own mythology. The film wants to be about grief and contagion. It settles for being about a house where bad things happen to people who walk inside.
Andrea Riseborough plays Detective Muldoon with a tight, exhausted focus that the script never rewards. She is a recent widow and a single mother and she carries both losses into every scene. Demián Bichir plays her partner Goodman as a man who already knows the house and refuses to go near it. John Cho and Betty Gilpin play Peter and Nina Spencer, expectant parents who receive devastating medical news and then move into the worst possible address. Lin Shaye plays Faith Matheson, an elderly woman losing her mind, and she finds real terror in the confusion. Jacki Weaver plays Lorna Moody, the right-to-die counselor who enters the Matheson house and never leaves it whole.
Pesce co-writes the script with Jeff Buhler and structures it as a fractured timeline. The film jumps between households and years, all of them orbiting the same address. The intercutting buries any momentum the story builds. A scare lands in one timeline and the film cuts away to another family before the dread can deepen. Pesce shoots the interiors in a sick, desaturated palette and lets the gore turn graphic. The sound design leans on the franchise’s signature death rattle until the croak stops registering as anything but a cue.
The Grudge has a cast that could carry a serious film about loss and the houses that hold it. Riseborough and Bichir and Cho deserve a story that trusts them. Pesce knows how to stage a disturbing image and proves it more than once. The structure works against him at every turn. The film keeps reaching for a generational tragedy and grabbing a jump scare instead. It ends where it began, in a house that takes everyone and means nothing.