The Grudge 2 (2006)

The Grudge 2 arrives in 2006 as the sixth and final installment in which Takashi Shimizu directs something bearing the Ju-On name, and the second in the American series. It is a sequel, which the marketing made clear, and it is nonlinear, which the marketing did not. Three storylines braid together across Tokyo and Chicago: a sister searching for her hospitalized sibling, a schoolgirl prank gone wrong, and an apartment building where the neighbors are dead and nobody has called anyone about it. Critics were not shown the film in advance, which in retrospect reads as a courtesy to everyone involved. It opened at number one anyway, beating The Departed, a fact that says more about October than about cinema.

For our purposes the question is not whether the film frightens, which it intermittently does, but what it believes. The answer is nothing. The cast blends Japanese and American performers, a choice dictated entirely by the two cities in the plot and not by any casting philosophy. Kayako crawls, Toshio meows, and the curse passes from body to body without a single observation about power, class, or history. No comment is made on race, though the film crosses two cultures. No feminist reading presents itself, though women die in nearly every scene. The dead are dead because they died angry, not because a system failed them.

This leaves a clean ledger. A supernatural curse is a supernatural curse. It carries no politics, no platform, no lesson, and it delivers none. The film's only agenda is the next jump, pursued with the single-mindedness of a machine. We can catalog the Tokyo and Chicago settings, the mixed ensemble, the female leads, the adolescent protagonist, and still find no message attached to any of it. The Grudge 2 is a haunted house with three doors and no thesis. It is a near-total absence of social consciousness, and it seems entirely at peace there.