The Grudge 2

What a goddamn bleak movie this is. Seriously. I remembered that I liked it a lot when I first saw it, even better than the Japanese original "Ju-On 2" on which it was based, but I forgot how depressing it is, which shows how bad my memory is getting in my old age. this movie is even bleaker than the first installment (which is saying a lot) and it expands on the first movie's preoccupation with unhappy marriages to include unhappy families in general and bad mothers in particular. In this movie we get to see a mother who literally sacrifices her child to demons, and it's really sad and nasty to watch (especially when the mother is confronted and insists that it's not her fault that her daughter was messed up later in life...sure, whatever you say, lady). The evil in this movie poisons a series of families in an apartment building, and like the first movie, there are lots of stories and timelines going on at once, and time isn't exactly linear and the past can fuck with the present in some very unpleasant ways. I also forgot that Jennifer Beals is in this movie, so it was great seeing her, even though things don't usually go well for people in these movies.