Ju-on (2003)

***½

Rika is saddled with a case (welfare volunteer) that results in her visiting a cursed home where a husband went berserk on his wife, son, and the pet cat. Like an infection that spreads, it isn’t in your best interest to wind up at a cursed place…those fallen to the curse often return to those still living. Rika goes to check on Ms. Sachie for the Social Welfare Office, seeing that this elderly woman is quite worse for wear…something has rendered her a lost mute drained of personality, a shell with little life or awareness of time and place, it seems. The house is in ruins, in tatters, as if a heavy wind ripped through it, with Rika having to do clean up while Sachie remains gone within her own mind.

What I like about the opening minutes is that director Shimizu establishes something bad lives in this place, and Rika arrives in its aftermath…so what will she herself encounter? What happened here? Just a few quick snippets of the family massacre are hinted at in just brief glimpses…Shimizu will give you just enough to recognize that a man, with a box cutter, grabs the cat, has a woman (obviously the wife) lying with dead eyes presumably in a bathtub, and the son scurrying towards the sound of the cat screeching.

Those who know The Grudge are familiar with the cat, the boy, and the mother. They are specters that remind us (and those who happen upon them unfortunately) of how those without rest have a way of not staying dead. Typically those who meet them don’t fare well afterward.

Rika notices a closet taped shut. She removes the tape. Not particularly wise. Later, she heads back downstairs to ask Sachie why the closet was taped. Soon they booth encounter, black as ash, Toshio’s (the boy) mother…

Kazumi is home with Ms. Sachie (who is “sleeping a lot these days”), her hubby’s mother (he is off to work while she stays behind to tend to mommy), and there’s mention of the sister, Hitomi. Hinted at when Rika hears a telephone call just a bit earlier in the film, there’s a time shift from the present to the past. Aftermath tells us someone (or something) caused quite a chaotic mess in the cursed home when Rika arrived. Now in the middle of the film (or second chapter), we are about to see just what that might be. A glimpse into the psyche of the father who killed his son, cat, and wife surfacing inside Kazumi’s husband, while she finds herself unable to move, as if exiled within her body, paralyzed by the curse in the house. Toshio and Kayako imprint themselves periodically in different areas of the place they called home. The man who put him there has left his madness also imprinted inside the building, like a bad infestation that captures its own host, Kazumi’s husband (Ms. Sachie’s son; Hitomi’s brother).

Hitomi is pushed out of the house by her brother, Katsuya, perplexed at his bizarre behavior, as the rain intensifies. The film decides to follow Hitomi after she’s sent away by her brother, leaving her work and going home. Encountering the mother and son ghouls briefly in her work building, Hitomi isn’t about to wait around for them to come get her. But since she’s *been inside* her brother’s cursed home, she’s got the imprint and so her fate was sealed as a result. The film gets clever during this point in the film. Not only does Hitomi speak to her brother on the phone, but at her door, through the peephole, there is waiting on her to open it! These ruses could be questioned logically, but, then again, the whole film leaves its share of questions. Like when Hitomi hides in her covers in her bedroom as the television distorts its shape, and you hear that droning echo of dread; Kayako emerges under the covers, pulls Hitomi towards her, and Hitomi’s body vanishes…to where? Where would Kayako take her?

Nakagawa, the detective assigned the case inside the cursed home, arrived after caseworker, Hirohashi, called law enforcement due to finding Rika in shock and Ms. Sachie dead. Later Hirohashi himself is found frozen in fear, dead. Toyama was the detective assigned to the Takeo and Kayako case which started the whole curse inside that damn house. Toyama takes a look at a security tape at the police department, with Kayako (looking like a faint shadow figure) approaching the camera with those eyes opening among a black mass absorbing the space of the lens; Shimizu is having fun here with the visual gimmicks. Even with two cops together in the house, Kayako is too much for them. That drone, the bones crackling, and the dead eyes; Kayako crawls towards her prey with them seemingly unable to even move most of the time, much less flee. 

Izumi was dared by her schoolmates to go into the cursed house, for which she does. Big mistake. The three girls she was with vanish, and Izumi holes up in her home (as her father, Toyama, did), but this decision (two of her other friends visit, realizing their pal is living in abject fear) doesn’t halt Kayako and those she turned into ghouls to follow her lead in incorporating others into oblivion.

The film returns to Rika, as she undergoes gradual torment by Toshio and Kayako…and cats (this scene, framed as a nightmare, is rather cheesy). Mariko, her sister, is soon involved inadvertently when she comes across Toshio, also finding herself in the cursed house. It isn’t long before Takeo emerges and Rika is face to face with the very cause of it all.

It is just accepted that this Japanese version of Shimizu’s The Grudge will be compared to the Gellar American Hollywood-ized version which had a lot more budget where he could afford more elaborate special effects (and still bring back scenes like when Kayako’s hand creeps up Rika’s hair while she showers and shot-for-shot almost the opening scenes in the home, occupied by new owners; except in the 2004 version, Americans are the unfortunate new owners) while staying true to the film that brought him recognition. I went and seen the 2004 version, remembering feeling it was okay. This version is episodic but seems to link all its individual chapters back to the house adequately. I might personally like Ringu—essentially this film’s relative success—a bit more, but Shimizu did enough to mix things up creatively using his ghouls to spook the various characters who simply couldn’t escape the curse coming for them. Logic holes aside (what exactly does Kayako do to the victims? Where do they go?), the film helped to carry the torch with the likes of Ringu and One Missed Call in introducing the onryō into pop culture. I’m the first to say there are better Asian horrors that were out before, during, and after Ju-on, but it is a standard bearer just the same. Great Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Chinese horrors need the catalysts to make the way: Ju-on and Ringu did that. Eventually, though, Hollywood wanted to make some money off of them, with results like One Missed Call, a 2008 abomination that made Miike’s film look like a masterclass in filmmaking (it wasn’t too bad a little film, certainly better than the excremental piece of shit that got dumped into theaters, becoming a death knell into the fun movement of Asian imports flooding the marketplace due to demand but buried under the weight of American remake stinkers trying to ape their success).