Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 13, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The inherent problem with the storytelling approach director Takashi Shimizu has taken with the Ju-on/Grudge movies has always been its fragmented nature. In dramatizing the scary/lethal effects of a curse born of murderous anger, one that can jump from victim to victim like a virus, the films’ narratives have jumped around too, crosscutting among characters and preventing the movies from achieving the sense of relentlessly accelerating dread that the best horror features possess. This drawback is exacerbated in The Grudge 2, in which the trio of alternating subplots are separated not only by place, but time as well.
The storyline (scripted, like the first Grudge, by Stephen Susco) begins with a trio of girls from Tokyo’s International School taking an unsanctioned field trip to the house where all the nastiness took place in the previous movie. The place is now a burned-out shell following the events of what we’re told is two years before (why the structure hasn’t been razed is never explained), but skittish Allison (Arielle Kebbel) is convinced by her two pals not only to go inside, but to step into the closet where the spirits of the slain Kayako (Takako Fuji) and little Toshio (Oga Tanaka) are known to dwell. It’s no surprise what happens next…
The movie then jumps back to shortly after the original’s conclusion, as Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn, given little to do but look pained), younger sister of previous heroine Karen (cameoing Sarah Michelle Gellar), is sent by their sickly mom to find out what happened to her sibling. After discovering Karen in hospital, where her terrified outbursts require her to be strapped to her bed, Aubrey meets journalist Eason (Edison Chen), who’s investigating that house’s dark history, and runs afoul of the curse herself. The most promisingly fresh story thread takes place in Chicago, where a young boy named Jake (Matthew Knight) becomes suspicious of, and scared by, the strange thumping noises coming from the apartment next door. When he spots Toshio lurking at the end of the hall, it’s clear that the grudge has somehow found its way across the ocean.
What isn’t clear is how we’re expected to invest emotionally in a scenario where the focus keeps changing and, for a long while, the subplots don’t seem to have any connection. For most of its running time, the film plays like an entry in a Kayako’s Greatest Hits collection, and her repertoire is starting to become stale. There are only so many ways Shimizu can have Kayako or Toshio loom at the edges of the frame or suddenly pop up to grab their victims; their early appearances pack a few modest jolts, but after a while the scare tactics become repetitious, even in the context of this one movie. Nor are we told much about them or their backstory that wasn’t explored in the previous Grudge, not to mention the Ju-on films. “I was hoping you could tell me something I don’t already know,” Eason tells Aubrey at one point, and it’s a sentiment the audience is likely to share.
We don’t learn much about the characters the ghosts are terrorizing either, and the performances are all oddly muted in the scenes where fear isn’t the required emotion. In fact, the material between the scare scenes is so underplayed that it at times seems more akin to Kiyoshi Kurosawa than to Shimizu, only without the undercurrent of doom that gives the former’s films their frissons. Shimizu (who takes a fetishist’s interest in his schoolgirls’ skirts and legs) is still clearly fascinated by the idea of bringing the supernatural into ordinary lives and locales, but the inspiration seems gone in Grudge 2, and no amount of loud musical stingers by composer Christopher Young (whose work here is much better in its mood-setting moments) can goose any real excitement into it.
The result is a triptych tale that satisfies neither in its parts nor as a whole, and feels emotionally incomplete, as if important pieces are missing. “There can be no end to what has started,” says one character as the film winds to a conclusion that frantically rewrites the rules of the mythology in an attempt to tie the plot strands together; by that point, it’s likely many viewers will be hoping that she’s wrong.
