General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Grudge (2019 film)

The Grudge is a 2019 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Nicolas Pesce, based on Takashi Shimizu's Japanese film Ju-On: The Grudge (2002). It is the fourth installment of the American Grudge series and, rather than remaking the earlier films, presents a new story set in suburban America that runs parallel to the 2004 film, in which the curse born in a Japanese murder house reaches the United States.¹^•² The film stars Andrea Riseborough, John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Demián Bichir, Lin Shaye, and Jacki Weaver, and was released in the United States on January 3, 2020.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Nicolas Pesce, co-written with Jeff Buhler, based on Ju-On: The Grudge by Takashi Shimizu⁵
Release	United States January 3, 2020; United Kingdom December 20, 2019; rated R, 94 minutes³^•⁶
Setting	A small town in suburban America, taking place at the same time as the 2004 film set in Japan²
Producers	Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, and Takashige Ichise for Screen Gems, Stage 6 Films, and Ghost House Pictures⁷
Box office	$21,221,803 domestic and $49,511,319 worldwide on a $10,000,000 budget; opened to $11,404,113 in 2,642 theaters³
Reception	20% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 128 reviews; Metascore 41 on Metacritic⁴^•⁸

Spoilers

Premise and place in the franchise

The film follows Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough), a single-mother police detective investigating a series of grisly murders at a house where anyone who enters ends up seeing horrific things that drive them to kill themselves or others.⁹ The killings occurred in a haunted house that passes on a ghostly curse to those who enter it, and the curse spreads to a terminally ill woman and her husband, and to another couple caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.⁴ An American woman brings the curse from the Japanese house to the United States before the opening credits.¹⁰

Pesce repeatedly framed the film as neither a sequel nor a remake. "This movie takes place at the exact same time that the Sarah Michelle Gellar Grudge takes place," he told Bloody Disgusting in September 2019, "so Sarah Michelle Gellar is doing her thing in Japan, and this is what's happening in America at that same time."² His reasoning drew on the structure of the Japanese series: in Japan, The Grudge is an anthology in which every film tells a different story with different characters, so a new installment could join the canon without remaking or contradicting the earlier movies.⁹ The film accordingly weaves together several story threads, connected by Muldoon, and tells them out of order in a non-linear structure like the Japanese originals.¹¹^•⁹

The American franchise began with the 2004 remake of Ju-On: The Grudge, directed by Shimizu himself, followed by two English-language sequels, the last in 2009.¹¹ Pesce's film opens with a scene in Japan showing how the curse traveled across the globe, and includes nods to familiar images from the series, such as the hand in the hair and the girl in the bathtub.¹²^•⁹

Production

Pesce came to the project through producer Roy Lee. While pitching a different movie, the two were discussing J-horror, and Lee mentioned that a new Grudge film was in development; Pesce pitched his anthology-based idea to Sony and Sam Raimi, who liked it and let him start from scratch.⁹ Raimi, who had produced the 2004 remake, had been searching for a director whose vision could reimagine the franchise for modern audiences.¹³

An R-rated approach. Pesce's first draft was judged an NC-17 movie by the studio, which had initially hoped for a PG-13 rating like the previous American remakes; the two sides met in the middle with an R rating, a decision the studio grew more comfortable with after the success of R-rated horror hits such as It.⁹ Pesce described the result as "this intense, brutalist sort-of nightmare" and said he looked to David Fincher films for a grounded feel.¹³ The British Board of Film Classification rated the film 18-equivalent content advice of "strong gore, violence, threat," noting scenes in which people are forced to kill others or take their own lives to escape a supernatural entity.⁶

Pesce also deliberately echoed the lo-fi aesthetic of the early Japanese films, which were made on very low budgets and felt, in his words, like home movies where ghosts happen to walk through the background.⁹ Filming took place in Winnipeg, Manitoba, chosen for its rundown sections of suburbia.¹⁴

Release and box office

The film was released in the United States on January 3, 2020, distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing, and ran in theaters through February 27, 2020.³ It opened to $11,404,113 over its first weekend in 2,642 theaters, ranking fourth, against a production budget of $10,000,000.³ It went on to gross $21,221,803 domestically (42.9 percent of its total) and $28,289,516 internationally, for a worldwide total of $49,511,319.³ As of October 2026 the film streams in the United States on Hulu and FXNow, with digital purchase and rental on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, and Fandango At Home, among others.¹⁵

Critical reception

The film received broadly negative reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 20 percent Tomatometer from 128 reviews, with the critics consensus reading: "Dull and derivative, the rebooted Grudge wastes a talented cast and filmmaker on watered-down scares."⁴ On Metacritic it has a weighted average score of 41 out of 100 based on 28 critics, categorized as "mixed or average"; a contemporary report in January 2020 gave the score as 37 out of 100 based on 21 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews."⁸^•¹⁶

Some critics found merit in its tone. Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com called it "often as nasty as you want it to be," while David Fear of Rolling Stone wrote that the final third piles on explicit gore and jump scares leading to a final scene as terrifying as anything in the original series.⁸ Others were harsher: Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film all premise and no development, and the Sydney Morning Herald's Sandra Hall gave it 2 out of 5, writing that Pesce had hired fine actors and squandered them on a plot not ingenious enough to justify the heartlessness of the package.¹⁶^•⁴ Recurring criticisms included heavy reliance on jump scares and thinly drawn characters among the large cast.⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026