The Grudge (2019)

Some films arrive bearing messages. This one arrives bearing a ghost, and then several more ghosts, and a house in Pennsylvania that functions as a supernatural complaint box. The Grudge, a soft reboot of an American series which was itself a remake of a Japanese original, concerns a detective named Muldoon, a curse carried across the Pacific, and a great deal of bleeding from the nose. It is a horror film. Nothing more, and little less.

The cast offers Andrea Riseborough as the detective and John Cho, Demián Bichir, and Frankie Faison in support. Their presence is a matter of hiring, not of argument. The film never pauses to remark upon it, which is either to its credit or evidence of simple indifference. The protagonist is a widowed mother with a badge, and the screenplay does nothing with that beyond placing her in rooms she should not enter. An ambitious undergraduate could assemble a feminist reading, but the film declines to assist.

What remains is absence. No LGBTQ+ characters. No engagement with race. No climate anxiety. No critique of capital. No body-positive messaging. No neurodivergent advocacy, though dementia appears, treated as a haunted condition instead of a social cause. History goes unrevised. Nobody lectures. The curse does not care about your politics, and neither, apparently, does the script. Critics were unkind and audiences handed it a rare F, which suggests the supernatural and the rhetorical can fail together. The house burns down in the final act. The lesson does not.