A grudge against period-appropriate set design

I bet I know what Nicolas Pesce, who wrote and directed the latest Grudge remake, thought when he set out to make it:

"I saw The Conjuring, and everything had this very old-fashioned look. That was really scary. Let's do that!"

Well, that made sense for The Conjuring, as it was set in 1971.

The Grudge, on the other hand, is set in the years 2004, 2005 and 2006. (And continues to jump between them in ways that are really distracting, which is just one of the faults of this really terrible movie.)

It makes no sense to have every third car you see look like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Yes, those are three actual cars driven in this movie, by three different main characters. Wha?

And they were only the ones I could find quickly by going back through the movie. There was also an old school station wagon in there, as well as a number of others parked on the street in the background of various shots.

Now, if it were a conscious decision to make all the cars date from the 1960s or 1970s, that would be one thing, but there are a smattering of new cars in there as well, including the one driven by Jacki Weaver's assisted suicide compassionate carer.

But it wasn't just the cars. If I could be bothered to continue scrolling through this movie, I could also show you countless phones with those old curly cords coming out of them, countless cassette tapes, a TV set into its own side paneling with big chunky push buttons on the front to change channel and turn up the volume, and any amount of retro furniture, wallpaper and lamps. The characters even smoke cigarettes in coffee shops.

I get it. I know cell phones are not as artistically pleasing as rotary phones. (The film does have exactly one cell phone, and that itself seems to be a period appropriate flip phone.)

But when you lacquer your film with so much retro art direction that is so clearly out of sync with the time period, people like me take notice. Might as well just set the movie in the 1970s and make it an American prequel to the originating events in Japan. (Foolishly, the movie insists on picking up shortly after the events of the original, with a different character returning from Tokyo to bring this grudge back to the U.S.)

In fact, you either set the movie in the 1970s or you set it today. Two thousand four through two thousand six? You are just asking us to nitpick, especially if most of your stylings are from 30 years earlier.

To be honest, though, it probably helped me get through this hapless succession of jump scares to have something other than the horror to focus on.