In short: The Grudge (2020)

For the first twenty minutes of its run time or so, I was all hyped to complain that Nicolas Pesce’s new US version of the classic (and still terribly creepy and disturbing) Japanese Ju-On franchise is not as bad as I was led to believe by the rest of the internet. However, I left that impression by the wayside rather quickly once the film started in earnest on its long, slow, tedious and pretty pointless slog through various flashbacks and two very slow police investigations whose structural mirroring may have sounded clever during the development of the script, but in practice simply doubles the tedium for very little reason. Well, there’s one line in the script that attempts to actually provide a reason for the film’s mind-numbing structure, but one single line that’s also supposed to explain the film’s thin thematic throughline to the audience does hardly distract from the fact the structure simply doesn’t add anything to the film; nor from how little the film actually does with its theme of grief and threatened and doomed family ties.

Sure, the Japanese films of the series often do something comparable – though actually more complicated because those are not just flashbacks - structurally, but in those films, the structure puts an extra emphasis on the inevitability of the characters’ eventual doom, where Pesce’s movie only emphasises how darn repetitive the film is. And honestly, the various shock scenes aren’t worth repeating, mostly going for watered down versions of the Japanese originals, replacing the highly characteristic creatures of the Japanese film with generic “revenant versions of former victims of the curse” that are just painfully bland, as well as ineffectively used.


Given the two good to great films Pesce made before this, I’m a bit disturbed that “bland” and “tedious” are the main descriptors I have for his attempt at a more mainstream horror affair. So that’s a success, right?

In short: The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

When she was young (and played by Olivia Bond), Francisca’s mother (Diana Agostini) was murdered by a serial killer doing a bit of home invasion business. Her father (Paul Nazak) arrived home just that little bit too late to save his wife, knocking out the killer and imprisoning him in the barn. The clearly traumatized man quickly put the responsibility for the killer on his daughter, who turned the man into her mutilated pet/”friend”.

Ten years or so later, Francisca (now having grown up to be played by Kika Magalhães) is royally screwed up psychologically, seeking human closeness and love in pathetic and unpleasant ways. Cuddling the corpse of her father, having sex with the killer whose still continuing time in the barn has left him hardly more than an animal, and murdering prospective one-night stands who get cold feet are all part of her desperate attempts at relating; baby-kidnapping’s closer than you think.

I am very much of two minds about Nicolas Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother. On one hand, it’s impossible not to admire the great craftsmanship of the film, the way it successfully views material that’s made for an extreme exploitation movie through the stylistic lens of arthouse cinema. Long takes, scarce dialogue, and usually gorgeous compositions are all par for the course here, as is artful handling of the decision to not show the inherent violence of the material but – except for a couple of very specific moments – only its aftermath (or sometimes the noises it produces on the film’s brilliantly realized soundscape). All this is at the very least aesthetically pleasing – not to be confused with pleasant in this particular case, obviously.


However, my problem with the film is that all of these great technical achievements are also ways for the film to distance itself and its audience from its material. Its unwillingness to go to the visible extremes you’d expect from the material certainly avoids any tackiness, or any way anyone could complain the film to ghoulishly wallow in all of the degradation and horror as a proper exploitation movie would, yet it also keeps at least this viewer at arms length from emotionally relating and understanding Francisca as more than an abstract case study that yes, trauma is bad for you, robbing the film of the visceral jolt I believe it needs. Sure, abstractly, all of the stuff in the film is pretty terrible, but it’s all so tastefully realized and abstracted from actual human pain, I found myself looking at it like a sociopath trying to figure out feelings, admiring the form but never connecting to the content.

Three Films Make A Post: Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect

Piercing (2018): Visually heavily influenced by the classic giallo (even the one sheet has the appropriate colour), Nicolas Pesce’s film, is placed somewhere between horror, general weirdness, and a very dark comedy about the ways people navigate their darkest desires. The whole thing is classed up by having Mia Wasikowska and Christopher Abbott going through all the stylized and ambiguous motions they are supposed to go through with the proper amount of suggested darkness and mystery. As an exercise in tone and style, the film is highly successful, evoking the mental states of its characters through sound and vision; I’m just not sure it really succeeds at doing as much with this as it could, not really seeming to go anywhere.

Ella Enchanted (2004): With a script that involves the talented hands of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith (who can make teen comedies do really clever and charming stuff and make it look it easy) I was expecting a bit more from this mock fairy-tale version of Cinderella about a young woman (Anne Hathaway) cursed/gifted with the inability to refuse an order, living in a fairy-tale land that does it damndest to evoke The Princess Bride (they even hired Cary Elwes) but is much too beholden to randomness and genericness to get there. But then, there are three other writers listed too, so it’s anyone’s guess how much of what made its way on screen is their fault. Tommy O’Haver’s direction is competent but also corporately bland in a way that is not a good fit for any comedy, and most of the film just barely gets by on Hathaway’s charm. The feminist subtext isn’t terribly involved, and too many of the film’s clever ideas aren’t actually.

Holy Smoke (1999): This comedy/psychodrama directed by Jane Campion, in which Harvey Keitel plays a charming asshole deprogrammer hired to brainwash Kate Winslet’s character back from her love for an Indian guru is usually treated as one of the director’s weaker films, and it is relatively easy to see why, even though a weaker Campion film is still better than anything various male big name critical darlings deliver on their best days (cough, Woody Allen, cough).

But there is a reason why comedy and Campion-style psychodrama are not usually genres that are combined - they don’t really come together well at all, and the film has quite a few moments when the comedic parts and the deep, tour-de-force character exploration (wonderfully portrayed by Winslet and Keitel) seem to belong to completely different worlds, or into completely different movies. This problem is certainly exacerbated by how awkward quite a bit of the film’s humour is.


And still, even though it is sometimes a struggle to get through the funny bits, Campion’s willingness to let ambiguities and complicated contradictions in and between characters stand and explore these spaces between them while keeping the social and all that comes with it in mind is so admirable, her ability to let certain things stand unresolved because they are not truly resolvable is so great that I’m rather okay to have to fight with the film a bit.