A lot of what made me think this movie was going to be different was the rich golden hue on most of its images, which is nice, but doesn’t contribute much of anything. Images courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.
2/10 I adore Takashi Shimizu’s American Grudge movies from the mid-‘00s for their unforgiving pacing and dense array of strong jump scares, so I was excited to see a reboot coming from writer/director Nicolas Pesce – not because I’d seen or enjoyed any of his prior work, just because I implicitly trust the process of promoting indie directors to do studio work despite all the examples of it not working out. I’d somehow gotten into my head the idea of this 2020 Grudge movie as being a passion project by someone who wanted to bring the franchise into a new decade instead of a routine attempt by Sony to milk its properties, one that they’d been trying to push out for almost 10 years by itself without success.
Hoping for a piece of art when I should have been expecting a corporate cast-off, I kind of got both.
Annual top 10 lists are dumb and arbitrary and I hate them, even as I’ve started doing them. We can do better here. Instead of a static list of 10 favorites, 10 peanuts with which to pack the year away forever, let’s put together a list of the movies that we’ll carry with us into the future.
