The Grudge is rather a mess of a film. Most obviously, the chronology and perspective constantly changes but the film is written in such a way that most of the flashbacks and perspective shifts primarily exist to give detail to information that has already been conveyed through exposition, or that is obvious through inference. As a result, most of the storytelling falls flat and the film lacks suspense since the viewer already knows what's going to happen most of the time. At the same time, none of the characters are really fleshed out so it's hard to care about them to begin with. Amusingly for an American version of this most of the principal characters just happen to be Americans living in Japan and mostly speaking English. If the film did anything at all with this cultural conflict it might be fun to ponder whether the apparitions just really hate Americans but alas, even this bit of fun is absent, and this is just another missed opportunity for some relatively obvious and easy character development that just doesn't show up.
The other major problem with this film is that the actual spirit that is killing people is barely seen for the majority of the film and when it does show up it just comes across as an inferior version of the malevolent entity from The Ring, an obvious influence. Instead, most of the film uses the spirit of a young boy in a muddled way. The boy is somewhat creepy because of his appearance, which provides all the menace that can be summoned from black eye makeup and a generous slathering of corpse paint. At the same time, he still looks like a very young boy and, for me at least, this inspired the usual sympathetic feelings I have towards a young child. The juxtaposition between his appearance and this sympathy almost becomes something interesting but once the film seemed to imply that he might be responsible for the deaths of some adults the situation took a turn for the absurd because there really isn't that much menace to be had from any child unless there's something obvious to the menace beyond appearance.
In any case, Shimizu overuses the child character and underuses the actual malevolent entity, not that she's all that threatening except in comparison to the boy. She's just a ghost with a "grudge" because she died in terrible pain and now she just kills people that come to her old house, because...well, the film certainly doesn't do anything to explain why she would want to kill people or why she mostly just haunts the house but sometimes leaves it to go after people that have been there before. Especially in comparison to The Ring, The Grudge fails to establish the power or motivation of its malevolent spirit at any point and in fact it's hard to imagine why she would be so powerful. All in all, this story simply isn't told very well and several aspects of it fail. It's hard to believe that this is actually the third or fourth time the director tried to tell this story given how poorly he tells it.
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