Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, Clea DuVall

5 out of 10 stars

Essentially just a big old haunted house movie, The Grudge is sufficiently creepy but overall so insubstantial that by the time your first wave of goosebumps has come and gone, you'll have a hard time remembering why they were there in the first place. A series of freaky-deaky set pieces strung together for maximum jolt-and-scream effect, The Grudge has a fun time playing fast and loose with the chronology of its story, which you can't figure out is happening in a matter of days or hours. But unlike the movie it so obviously wants to be, The Ring, it doesn't really flesh out the mythology of its back story, or make any but a few of its characters remotely sympathetic; it does, however, share that movie's sense of extreme nihilism combined with the menace of modern technology. You can't escape from the vengeful ghosts, and that phone/television/VCR/security system that was supposed to make your life easier is just a tool at their disposal. Basically, you're screwed.

Directed by Takashi Shimizu, who helmed the original Ju-On this movie's a remake of, The Grudge takes a large number of pretty, white people and dumps them into Tokyo, where their stranger-in-a-strange-land quality is merely a precursor of more unsettling things to come. Blonde Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a nurse who's moved to Japan with her architecture-studying boyfriend (Jason Behr) and is making a wan but game attempt at fitting in. Possessed of remedial Japanese, she's dispatched across the city to attend to a catatonic old woman (Grace Zabriskie, whose mere face conjures up creeps galore from Twin Peaks) whose regular caretaker didn't check in. (Um, yeah, we get to see what happens to poor nurse Yoko in the prologue, and it ain't pretty.) Solidly dependable, Karen makes her way to the house with a steady determination – the same quality that aids her when she finds the old woman alone and scared, the house a mess, and a closet mysteriously taped shut. Hearing cat-like noises, Karen rips off the tape and finds a young boy who will only tell her his name, Toshio. Things go quickly downhill from there.

It's at about this time, when Karen comes face to face with a lugubrious black menace with scary eyes, that The Grudge jumps back in time to a family of newly-installed Americans: marrieds Jennifer and Matthew Williams (Clea DuVall and William Mapother), sister Susan (KaDee Strickland), and, of course, Mom, who Karen just met. They've just moved themselves into a lovely house, but unfortunately, they have a penchant for walking down eerie hallways that would send even an irregularly curious Jennifer Love Hewitt scurrying for cover. Each of the Williams is soon dispatched by the extremely malevolent spirits inhabiting this new home – but as Susan finds out, the spirits aren't really housebound, and they manage to make their way to her place of business and her secure high-rise apartment. Each vignette is fairly creepy and effective: DuVall is a great Jamie Lee Curtis type, instilling the audience with immediate empathy for her lost-in-Japan spouse, and Strickland's stalking is a tour-de-force of unescapable, escalating terror that's mixed with the right amount of humor.

But as the grim Karen starts to uncover the mystery of the house (involving a murder-suicide that happened three years ago and the still-lingering feelings of those involved), you'll come to realize that all The Grudge wants you to do is sit back and not relax so it can try to scare the crap out of you. As far as cinematic raison d'etres go, it's a fine one, but it doesn't really build on either its story or its mood in the way The Ring did. When Naomi Watts uncovered the tale of spawn-from-hell Samara, it was a wonderfully dreadful unfolding, the kind you watched through splayed fingers. Here, while Gellar is certainly an earnest heroine and definitely the smartest person in the movie, you just wait for Karen to put all the pieces together (which include Bill Pullman, a professor who throws himself over a balcony in the beginning of the film for reasons unknown) and once she does, to save her doofus of a boyfriend too. Though Shimizu piles on the style, as well as the musical cues and jumps-out-of-nowhere, you're never more than just fitfully gripped, though some of the images, including Toshio's cat-like yowls and the specter of a gruesomely decomposed young woman, are unsettling enough to keep you up a little bit when you go to bed. Overall, though, you'll easily fall asleep in no time.

And with its Americans-uncomfortable-in-Japan vibe, you'll also be put in mind of another recent Tokyo-based movie about unsettled foreigners in a strange city. The most intriguing thing about The Grudge is imagining how it would play on a double bill with Lost in Translation, for the doomed folks in this movie would also be more than willing to ask what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding, especially when confronted with murderous ghosts. Pass the Suntory, please – they could all use a drink.