hough she's only just started volunteering as a caregiver, Rika (Okina) is sent to a nearby home to check up on an old woman in the hospital's care. What she finds is disturbing—the house is in disarray, and the old woman is alone and won't speak. But that doesn't mean that the place is silent. A scratching noise coming from upstairs reveals a young boy sealed in a closet who disappears as soon as he's freed.
A flashback to another time reveals the same house, but in perfect order, lived in by a young married couple caring for the husband's aging mother. One evening, however, the husband and wife are stunned and terrified to find a young boy running around their home. When the husband's sister, Hitomi (Ito), comes to visit the mother for dinner, her brother pushes her back out the door. Something terrible has happened.
And it's terror that follows Hitomi home, bleeding into the world around her. Spirits of the dead gape at the living, grasping at them from the shadows and, as shadows, dragging them into the dark.
Meanwhile, Rika is trying to solve the mystery of the disappearing boy, a search that eventually leads to a retired detective who once investigated the murder of a family in the house Rika has been to. And it's not just the detective who has had to live with the horror of the things he once saw there—his daughter, too, is cursed with visions of the restless dead.
Creepy but confusing
Though it eventually gets to some interesting and scary places, Ju-On takes a somewhat tortuous and torturous path to get there. Its horror-suspense is built up in some rather run-of-the-mill ways (didn't ringing phones stop being frightening a while ago?), and its story will likely leave many viewers fairly baffled by the end.
The narrative is divided into chapters, each chapter expanding the murderous history of, and group of characters affected by, the horror that emanates from the haunted house. The rage of hungry ghosts (à la butoh) spreads like an infection over time, and it's the way this film plays with time that is at once its most innovative and its most confusing move.
Ju-On does possess a number of moments and images that truly make the flesh crawl, though its relatively frequent opting for well-lit waking-world terrors sometimes leaves it lacking a certain amount of atmosphere. Its thematic focus on the horrors of families self-destructing adds a good amount of dramatic tension to the story, but Ju-On stops short of making any real statement (subtle or obvious, implicit or explicit) about society and human relationships (as horror movies can do so well).
Devoted fans of Japanese horror—like Ringu—may feel driven to experience this addition to the genre, but Ju-On might not appeal to the casual horror moviegoer—though maybe the remake will. As Ringu did (with The Ring), Ju-On is getting a Hollywood treatment (called The Grudge), with Sarah Michelle Geller playing the lead. The difference with this remake, however, is that it's keeping its original director. Time will tell whether the translation's more comprehensible.
