Ju-on: The Grudge (2002)

Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), directed by Takashi Shimizu, 4.5 stars

"A Curse born of a strong grudge held by someone who died.  The place of his death gathers his grudge.  Anyone who comes into contact with this curse shall lose his life and a new curse is born."  – Japanese proverb

If “Ju-on: The Grudge” is any indication, haunted houses in Japan don’t play by the same rules as those invented in Hollywood.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve been bad or good; you’re as good as dead when you enter the one in this film.

This is the only film in the “Ju-on” oeuvre that I’ve seen so far, and on first viewing (I’ve since watched it again), I found it eerily unsettling.  I also found it a bit confusing, but not as a result of any deficiency in the film.  I simply couldn’t consistently differentiate all of the characters.  There are many of them, and some not only look similar (at least to me), they also have similar sounding names.  On second viewing, this was not a problem, and I’m sure it would not be a problem of any sort for a Japanese audience. 

The film is organized into 10-15 minute titled segments that move backward and forward in time, a narrative form that makes the film much more interesting and demands more attention from the viewer.  I’m still not 100% clear if any of these chapters actually represents the present, but for my own purposes, I will ascribe that timeframe to the first full segment titled “Rika.” The scene begins after the credits and a violent opening sequence consisting of quick and jarring cuts to blades, blood, and other carnage, none of which can be fully contextualized until one has seen the film in its entirety.  If “Rika” takes place in the present, then we travel both into the past as well as several years into the future, but I’ll say more about that a bit later.

Rika, a young and inexperienced social worker, is sent to pay a visit to an elderly woman.  A colleague was dispatched the day before and has not been heard from.  Rika enters the house and finds it littered with food and miscellaneous debris which is strewn all about.  She hears scratching coming from a translucent screen door and opens it to find the old woman clawing at it, the first in a series of progressively spookier scares.  After cleaning up as best she can, she hears a noise and follows the sound to an upstairs bedroom where she finds a closet that has been carelessly taped shut.  A cat howls from behind the closet door, so she removes the tape, peers inside, and spots the cat and a little boy, bruised from head to toe, holding on to it.  I don’t think I’m giving too much away by saying that the boy and cat are bad news, but they’ve got nothing on the other dangerous denizens of the house.  Not that it makes much difference.  All of them are equally capable of dispensing a momentary chill of terror prior to dispatching their victim.

But it isn’t the blood and gore that makes this film so effective.  It is the steady stream of small horrors that nibble at the psyche before consuming their victims whole.  Objects of terror are as likely to appear in a bright, busy restaurant as they are in the recesses of a dark attic.  They are especially likely to lurk in one’s peripheral vision.  A turn of the head and they’re gone—at least for now.  Characters are never really sure if there was or still is something there, and often neither are we.  


Director Takashi Shimizu is a master of transference.  The audience is nearly as unnerved as Rika and others by the subtle assaults on our consciousness: a floating wisp of hair, a puff of black smoke, a distorted image on a TV screen, a small figure rushing by out of the corner of one’s eye, a figure reflected briefly in a glass door, or a mirror that momentarily reveals a ghostly shadow.   These images linger long, and like the demonic curse they represent, are not confined to the threshold of a hateful, haunted house.