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JU-ON: THE GRUDGE
Rating: 
Japan. 2003.
Director/Screenplay – Takashi Shimizu, Producer – Taka Ichise, Photography – Tokusho Kikumura, Music – Shiro Sato, Production Design – Toshiharu Tokiwa. Production Company – Oz.
Cast:
Megumi Okina (Nishina Rika), Misaki Ito (Tokunaga Hitomi), Kanji Tsuda (Tokunaga Katsuya), Shuri Matsuda (Tokunaga Kazumi), Misa Uehara (Toyama Izumi), Yoji Tanaka (Detective Toyama Yuji), Hirokazu Inoue (Detective Nakagawa), Takako Fuji (Kayako), Kayoko Shibata (Mariko), Saisuke Honda (Detective Igarishi), Yui Ichikawa (Chiharu), Yukako Kukuri (Miyuki), Chikako Isomura (Sachie), Chikara Ishikura (Hirohashi), Yuya Ozeki (Toshio)
Plot: Social worker Rika goes to help an elderly woman at the Tokunaga household and discovers a mysterious boy in the house. Earlier Katsuya, the husband of the household, returned home to find his wife Kazumi in shock and was then haunted by the mystery boy. His sister Hitomi is also haunted after entering the house. Police enter the house to find Rika in a state of shock. The mystery boy she reports seeing is found to have gone missing under mysterious circumstances. The detectives contact Toyama, the original investigating detective, but he, followed by his teenage daughter Izumi, is then haunted after he tries to return and destroy the house.
Like most of the films to emerge from the new wave of Japanese horror (or J-horror), Ju-on: The Grudge owes its inspiration to the work that started the Japanese horror renaissance – the massively successful Ring (1998). Indeed Ju-on: The Grudge bears many resemblances to Ring – the curse that is passed onwards, the female creature with the hair covering its face, haunted things happening on video screens.
Ju-on: The Grudge is quite one of the spookiest films that one can recall having sit down to watch in a theatre in some time. Director Takashi Shimizu creates a genuinely haunted atmosphere. The film is filled with scenes that evoke an intense uncanniness. There’s a spooky little boy who is perpetually turning up everywhere – under restaurant tables, hiding behind the bars at the top of a stairwell, in bed with one of the heroines, even at one point emerging from inside one victim’s blouse. And there are other images that are quite disconcerting – the unearthly looking woman with the long, disjointed back and hair draped across her eyes who is seen crawling down stairs, emerging from toilet cubicles, all accompanied by bizarre croaking noises. Or the mysterious black shadow that one heroine finds hovering over a comatose old woman. In fact, director Takashi Shimizu creates a spooky, haunted atmosphere far better than Ring itself does.
On the other hand, exactly as much as one praises the atmosphere of the film, one can equally condemn it for its almost entire lack of plot. The film is divided into eight chapters, with each given the name of the person who becomes victim to the curse. Yet there almost nothing in the way of plot that connects these episodes together. The episodes are not even in chronological order. There is no explanation of what is behind the hauntings, who the boy and the other ghosts are, why this particular house is haunted and why some victims are chosen. There’s a title card at the start that explains that the ‘ju-on’ is a curse that continues after death when someone dies in a fit of rage and is passed from person to person – but the script never deigns to explain who died in anger and how this relates to the little boy and mysterious woman. There’s reference made to the boy’s mysterious disappearance but nothing much is explained, while similarly the detective Toyama is said to have investigated what happened at the house, but exactly what is unclear. There’s also reference made to three missing schoolgirls, but again what they have to do with things is equally unclear.
Some of this could well be cleared up when one realizes that The Grudge is not a stand-alone film, but rather that it is actually the third in a series. The first was Ju-on (2000), which similarly told a series of connected episodes about a haunting centred around a house, and was followed by Ju-on 2 (2000), which continued in the same vein. Both were directed by Takashi Shimizu but intended for video rather than theatrical release and much lower budgeted. Both also feature the ghost boy and long-haired woman and follow the same basic idea of everybody who comes in contact with them being fatally haunted. Ju-on: The Grudge is a big-screen reworking of the two video films. This was followed by two theatrical sequels Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (2003) and Ju-on: The Grudge 3 (2008). Takashi Shimizu was also employed to direct an English-language remake The Grudge (2004), starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, as well as its sequel The Grudge 2 (2006).
Takashi Shimizu appears to be shaping up to be a major name in Japanese horror. Aside from the Ju-on/Grudge series, he has made the exceedingly strange and quite unclassifiable Marebito (2004) about a man finding a vampire-like woman beneath the Tokyo subway and Reincarnation (2005).
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2003 list. Nominee for Best Director (Takashi Shimizu) at this site’s Best of 2003 Awards).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2004
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