Nicolas Pesce's directorial career is off to a great start. His extremely bleak black & white debut THE EYES OF MY MOTHER earned a 9/10 review from Arrow in the Head's own Eric Walkuski, and his newly released, giallo-tinted second feature PIERCING got an 8/10 review from our own Mike Sprague. With his third film, Pesce will be rebooting the GRUDGE franchise.
The release of Pesce's GRUDGE is still about eleven months away, so we probably won't be hearing much about it for a while, but in an interview with Entertainment Weekly he has discussed his approach to the material. Describing his take on the concept as "very different" from previous GRUDGE films, Pesce said,
I think that horror audiences these days are looking for a much more grounded, much more realistic, much more character-driven story in their horror movies. We see what’s doing well now and it is these kind of smarter, more nuanced horror stories, and that’s what this is going to be. We’re trying to update it for contemporary sensibilities, and we have an unbelievable cast, and I think it’s going to be something very different."
A source of inspiration for Pesce's "new, fresh spin" on the GRUDGE idea is David Fincher's dark, gritty detective film SEVEN (or SE7EN, if you prefer).
The movie is set up a lot more like SEVEN, that sort of movie. There’s a cop drama that drives the whole thing, and Andrea (Riseborough) is the lead detective on this new case that they’ve come upon, and is the driving force through the movie."
That does sound like it could make for an interesting film. One that starts off as dark, realistic cop drama, but then the detective gradually uncovers the supernatural weirdness we expect to see in a GRUDGE film…
We'll see how well Pesce's approach works when the new GRUDGE reaches theatres on January 3, 2020.
In addition to Riseborough, the "unbelievable cast" also includes Lin Shaye, John Cho, and Demian Bichir.