Sarah Michelle Gellar

Too many movies aimed at young people assume that they’re too stupid to tell good entertainment from bad.

I decided to have my students at Heights High School choose the movie I would review. The movie they chose, "The Grudge," perhaps confirms that filmmakers think teens will go to anything.

"The Grudge" depends on style over substance in a failed attempt to frighten audiences with the supernatural aftereffects of a brutal murder.

Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, "The Grudge" theorizes about the evil that is created when someone dies in intense anger. The evil remains to infect everyone that it can, wreaking horror and death whenever possible.

So that’s the whole plot. Except it isn’t. Watching this movie is like watching an excellent story about passion and betrayal overlain with a veneer of nonsensical supernatural violence.

"The Grudge" is well filmed. The story is well told. And writer/director Takashi Shimizu is to be commended for his skill at startling audiences. Fleeting glimpses of spooky people in corners and reflected in mirrors drew continual gasps and screams from a mostly teenage audience.

Equally exciting is the attention to acting. The story (actually Shimizu’s third film dealing with this story) deftly juggles multiple viewpoints and timelines as the pieces of the puzzle are laid out for the audience.

The acting is exceptional. Gellar, an excellent actress, does her best with the role of American nursing student Karen, but she isn’t given a lot to work with. Karen is essentially an observer in the movie. She is the lens through which the audience sees the story, which actually took place two movies ago.

Ryo Ishibashi is exceptional as Detective Nakagawa, the investigator of the crime from two films ago. With very little dialogue he adds a deep sense of caring and hopelessness to what could easily have been a caricature of Japanese formality, efficiency and aloofness.

The rest of the cast members live up to Gellar and Ishibashi in the quality of their performances. The trouble is that the story doesn’t live up to the actors.

Filmmaking and acting are storytelling skills, and they don’t work if the story isn’t there. The weird thing is that there is a great story in this movie. It just isn’t a horror story.

This movie isn’t really scary; it is startling. Scary happens when the movie gets inside your head. This film asks us to believe that the aura of a place can kill us. Gruesomely. I didn’t believe it.

While there are good things about "The Grudge," the film is ultimately unsatisfying.