If you can’t immediately guess based on the header here, I have enormous issues with The Grudge, but in this post I’ll tell you, in brief, that the urinary color scheme isn’t the worst of the film’s problems.
I’ll also tell you that I don’t have much positive feeling about The Grudge as a franchise, whether we’re talking about the original Japanese films or the American remakes, which I think are genuinely bad; the Japanese movies just aren’t to my taste, and I’m not sure I can really fault them in terms of craft or writing.
I’ll also also tell you that pre-Grudge, I was 50/50 on Nicolas Pesce; I think The Eyes of My Mother looks great but only in service to hollow nastiness, and I think Piercing, which I talked to him about last year, is stellar. He’s a talent in search of material that suits him. I don’t think The Grudge suits him especially well, and I honestly feel that in so many ways, big and small, this is a movie fed through the studio machine and made weaker for it.
Regardless of why it’s so bad, it’s bad. You can read my full review for Paste Magazine.