Can you recommend a horror movie based on its impressive meanness? Meet Nicolas Pesce’s new and improved take on The Grudge, which is often as nasty as you want it to be, its cheesy jump-scares and generic packaging be damned.

This is not a “fun” horror picture. It’s about miseries both supernatural and mundane. And, yes, it’s scary. Pesce’s art-film roots are evident in the movie’s slow-burn first hour. But in the final third, The Grudge piles on the explicit gore and jump scares — all leading to a final scene and final shot as terrifying as anything in the original series.

There’s plenty of grisly stuff here, and a lot of it is done practically, which might entice some gorehounds. But that can only go so far. Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother has ten times less gore than this and still managed to be ten times as scary. Here’s hoping he gets back to making something like that, and soon.

To start as a genre resuscitation and end up as simply generic — that’s a far more fatal ending than any curse befalling the characters onscreen.

Brief moments of brilliance, including a riveting performance by Riseborough and a number of gorgeous frames, only shine with momentary appeal before the whole thing slips back into vapidity and convention.

The first hair-raising moment comes 50 minutes in, but the deaths are anti-climactic even as the chilling tone is maintain, largely through dim lighting and very good actors

The Grudge 2020 is a prestige drama sidelined by lackluster, incoherent horror, ruining the scares and undercutting the humanity of its characters.

The Grudge plods on as if it were something more than formula gunk, cutting back and forth among the thinly written unfortunates who’ve been touched by the curse of that house.

Nearly devoid of scares for the casual horror consumer, it will likely elicit a respectful dismissal from genre connoisseurs: "We get what you're trying to do," they might gently say to the filmmakers. "It didn't work."

I saw this movie in the middle of the day, having had a great night’s sleep, and I had to slap myself awake a few times.