The Grudge 2 (2006) – A Movie A Day 2021 #50
The Grudge 2 (2006) – A Movie A Day 2021 #50
Today’s movie was an easy choice. As a follow-up to The Grudge (2004) yesterday, today’s movie of the day is The Grudge 2 (2006). Director Takashi Shimizu is back for the sequel to his American remake of his own movie, and even though The Grudge 2 isn’t as good as The Grudge (2004), it’s still quite effective in a lot of ways. Unlike The Grudge (2004) being a fairly close remake of Ju-On: The Grudge, The Grudge 2 is not a remake of Ju-On: The Grudge 2 despite bringing over some elements from previous Ju-On movies. Not being a remake helps The Grudge 2 feel a bit like a fresh start, and a bigger focus on Kayako’s curse venturing out of the house and over to America helps it feel different than a lot of what came before it.
Like The Grudge (2004) and other Ju-On movies, The Grudge 2 tells multiple stories that begin to converge as the movie goes on. One story follows Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) as she travels to Japan to make an attempt to bring her sister Karen home. Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is still in the hospital after the events of the first movie, and Aubrey becomes overwhelmed with family baggage, her sister’s condition, and the mystery behind what happened to Karen and her boyfriend. Aubrey tries to find out what happened to Karen which leads her to the cursed Saeki house.
Another story follows three young women who attend an international school in Japan together. One of the girls, Allison, is tricked into entering the Saeki house by two bullies, Vanessa and Miyuki. The prank obviously goes bad, and the curse begins to follow them.
The third story takes place in Chicago, and it follows a young boy named Jake who is dealing with his father re-marrying after Jake’s mother passed away. As Jake is processing his feelings, something strange begins happening to the people around him, and the strangeness seems to be centered around a nearby apartment.
Each story is told linearly, and the intercutting between all three makes it feel like they’re all happening at the same time. If you’re paying attention to some early dialogue you can figure out when two of the stories are happening in relation to each other, but the third story’s time is left a mystery until the end. At first it’s not entirely clear how the stories are connected, but connections are made in a fun though not always unpredictable way. One of the reveals at the end is quite good, but another one isn’t so much of a reveal since it seemed pretty obvious what the connection was about halfway through the movie. It was still enjoyable watching the characters figure it out though. This movie feels a lot more linear than other Ju-On/Grudge movies I’ve seen, and despite the opening scene and a few overlaps, the three main stories never skip back and forth in time. That definitely makes the movie easier to follow than some of the Ju-On movies, though following the timeline was never a big deal in my opinion. As long as the narrative delivers tension ad scares, I’m fine with a bit of time and space ambiguity.
There are a good number of effective scares in The Grudge 2. One of my favorites is one that caught me a little off guard. I won’t spoil it, but it happens when Allison is talking to a counselor at her school. I thought the scare was going to be one thing, but then something else happened and it got me good. I also enjoyed some of the riffs Takashi Shimizu did on some familiar scares from the series. For example, there’s a shower scene, and one of the most iconic scares from the Ju-On/Grudge franchise involves a scare in the shower. Shimizu doesn’t do what you might expect though, and I enjoyed that very much. There’s also a reference to the scene he’d already done twice where a ghost creeps up on a person in their bedsheets, but again, Shimizu changes it up.
Watching some of the featurettes on the DVD helped give a little insight on Shimizu’s mindset and probably explains why he chose to change things up a bit with this movie. The Grudge 2 was Shimizu’s sixth feature length installment of the franchise in six years. Including the two short films that came before the features, Shimizu had been writing and directing the series for eight years. In come of Shimizu’s comments on the DVD, he talks about wanting to do something different if he was going to take the job to direct this second American installment. The Grudge 2 does feel different than what came before, but maybe not always for the best.
I enjoy The Grudge 2 quite a lot, but apparently it was quite a struggle to get the movie written. The Japanese writers (including Shimizu) and the American writers had very different ideas about what the movie should be and how they should approach it. Japanese and American storytelling can be quite different in a lot of ways, and Shimizu apparently had to make a lot of concessions with regards to how he wanted to tell the story. What I saw didn’t go into specifics about what Shimizu may have wanted versus what was actually shot and edited, but The Grudge 2 doesn’t feel quite as genuine as The Grudge (2004), if that makes any sense. The sequel feels a little too clean and easy to digest while there was some ambiguity to The Grudge (2004). The Grudge 2 dives into Kayako’s backstory a lot more, and the curse feels less mysterious because of it. The atmosphere is still often very good, but I suppose it felt like the movie was holding my hand a bit too much.
That said, I still think The Grudge 2 is a very good sequel. I like the story picks up pretty much where the first movie ended, and it continues to move Kayako’s curse forward. There are a bunch of creepy moments and nice scares, and that’s about as much as I can ask for from a sequel to a remake. Now I suppose I need to watch the third American Grudge, because I know I’ve never seen that one. Takashi Shimizu would not return to direct that, and in fact, The Grudge 2 was his last time directing any movie in the franchise. That’s a shame, but I can imagine wanting to move on to other things after spending so much time in the same mindset.