The Grudge (2019)★★★★☆

Okay, I think this might be my favorite of the American Grudge films. A lot of the problems I had with the previous films were mostly gone or otherwise solved in this one, and I found it genuinely entertaining.

(Probably lots of spoilers ahead) To start with, the curse that follows Fiona home to the States becomes HER curse. Fiona and Melinda are the primary ghosts in this story, not Kayako and Toshio. This makes sense to me! And makes it more interesting than rehashing the same ghost story over and over again.

I appreciated the character development they did throughout this one. Andrea Riseborough’s Detective Muldoon is a sympathetic single mom, and I mostly believed that Burke was her son she cared deeply about. I appreciated how a lot of the exposition was done through her investigation, which made the jumping back and forth between timelines a bit easier to follow than in some of the previous films.

I think it’s always tough to make a genuinely scary sequel using the same premise as previous films, especially without resorting to a bunch of jump scares… and this movie does kind of prove that point. It’s not terrifying, but it is unsettling, and there are certainly creepy moments. Practically every moment Lin Shaye is on screen, for example. (How do I not already have a “Lin Shaye” collection on this site?)

I’m actually glad they made this movie. It was interesting seeing something sort of new, even within the constraints of the series. I don’t think I need a sequel to this one, though. Let’s just let the curse die already.