Sarah Michelle Gellar

Is Gellar’s character in The Grudge like Buffy?

Sarah Michelle Gellar sets aside her vampire slaying to discover that horror translates into any language

Legend has it (or so the audience is told at the beginning of The Grudge) that when someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, their spirit lingers on to torment and destroy the living. Evidence of this curse can be found inside one particular house in Tokyo, where angry ghosts lie in wait to exact their vengeance on anyone who darkens their doorway. Our Pick: B-

Unaware of the house’s history, American social worker Karen (Gellar) agrees to visit the house as her first field assignment after the disappearance of a colleague who was supposed to look in on an elderly woman living there. Karen finds the woman, Emma (Grace Zabriskie), in a disheveled mess and a near-catatonic state. The house’s owners-Emma’s son, Matthew (William Mapother), and his wife, Jennifer (DuVall)-also seem to be missing. Following a noise upstairs, Karen makes a startling discovery in a closet and flees downstairs to an even more chilling sight.

What she sees leaves Karen cowering in the corner, traumatized. She is later found in that state by her supervisor (Ted Raimi) and taken to the hospital, where she is met by her concerned boyfriend, Doug (Behr). Though Karen believes she is safe, her ordeal is only just beginning. She’s been inside the house; now she’s part of the cycle, which includes not only Matthew and Jennifer, but Matthew’s sister, Karen’s supervisor, the detectives investigating the case and anyone else who enters the house. All of them are stalked by the same pale-faced little boy and long-haired woman, manifestations of a mother and son who were brutally murdered by the one-time man of the house.

Karen researches the house’s original residents and uncovers their long-buried secrets, but is it enough to break the curse? Even more disturbing, Doug has left Karen an ominous voice-mail message saying that he’s gone to look for her in the worst possible place.

Just a lite episode of Buffy

Unless you’ve been living in another dimension for the past few years, you probably know that The Grudge represents the first leading role for Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar since that show ended its run on UPN in 2003. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem quite ready to move on from Buffy just yet. Gellar’s character in The Grudge is Buffy Lite, without the cool moves or the help of the Scooby gang. The fact that the plot could easily be an episode of the show doesn’t help matters, either.

Regardless of what it says in the advertisements, Gellar isn’t the real star of this film anyway. That title can be split between the two Japanese actors, Takako Fuji and Yuya Ozeki, who steal the show as the ghosts Kayako and Toshio, respectively. In all fairness, the two did not create their characters from scratch, but merely reprised their roles from the Japanese film Ju-on, on which The Grudge is based. Wisely, producer Sam Raimi and his partner, Rob Tapert, hired director Takashi Shimizu to remake his own film, using as many of the same elements from the original as possible. Much of the mood and tone translates well, relying as it does on startling visual creep-outs and the building of suspense with sound design and music.

Another smart choice was retaining the original Tokyo setting and bringing on a cast of Hollywood actors to play the victims (though now it seems as if the ghosts hate Americans in particular for some reason). The audience shares the characters’ isolation and a feeling of being off-balance, even before the horror kicks into gear. From the first scene (a jaw-dropping moment not in the original film), Shimizu sets up a world where anything can happen at any moment, and that knowledge infuses the truly frightening scenes with a sense of dread.

Ju-on worked in Japan because Japanese audiences tend to be more accepting of incongruous narratives and focus more on striking visual concepts than on detailed plot points. For The Grudge, Shimizu made certain compromises to make the story more accessible to American tastes, but there is still much left unexplained and much that simply doesn’t make sense. Audiences may find themselves covering their eyes with one hand and scratching their heads with the other.

It’s evident that Gellar is staking (with apologies to Buffy fans for the bad pun) her career as a feature actress on the success of The Grudge. While the project was a bold choice, her character fails to offer anything original or new.