Detail: US/ 90 mins/ (15PG).
A remake of the director's own Ju-On, The Grudge is a horror film very much in the style of The Ring, itself a Hollywood remodelling of a (superior) Japanese movie. Indeed, The Grudge bears more than a passing resemblance to Ring in terms of style and atmosphere, but it lacks a real sense of purpose and a killer punch.
In a Tokyo that is strangely under populated by Japanese people, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Karen, a social worker student who lives with her boyfriend Doug (Behr), an architecture undergrad. After a fellow student goes inexplicably missing, Karen is asked to take over her duties as carer to Emma (Zabriskie), an older woman who appears to have lost her mind. Bad things, as you may have already guessed, soon start to happen.
Continuing Hollywood's obsession with Asian horror movies - The Ring 2 and Dark Water will arrive in the next few months - The Grudge seems eager to reproduce a template rather than forging any fresh territory of its own. Like The Ring, The Grudge shows real promise with a selection of mildly scary set-ups, but the director seems incapable of stringing them together in a cohesive fashion. The fractious nature of the narrative is the film's most fatal flaw, meaning that you're waiting for a pay-off that never arrives.