Grimcutty (2022): The Babadook Did It Better

I’ve recently watched Grimcutty (2022) and wasn’t impressed, hence this review. Warning: SPOILERS.

Parents everywhere are freaking out about the Grimcutty, a meme that’s allegedly making children hurt themselves and others. Asha, a teenage girl who has a tense relationship with her parents, Amir and Leah, and fights stress by making ASMR videos, thinks the whole thing is ridiculous… until she’s attacked in her own home by the Grimcutty itself. However, since the only person who can see it is the intended victim, her parents believe she’s self-harming, just like they had been warned about. Asha’s only chance to save herself is finding out more about the Grimcutty with the help of her younger brother, Kamran, and a rebellious classmate, Cassidy. However, it seems that not only has no one actually seen the meme, they also don’t know where it came from…

The most shocking moment in the movie is in the beginning, when a kid, Brandon, sees Grimcutty, runs from him into his mother’s room, and… stabs her. After this, it all goes downhill and never gets better than average. We also won’t be seeing Brandon and his mum until much later in the movie. The story focuses on Asha and her family, though the characterization is pretty thin. Amir is the strict parent, Leah the conciliatory one, and Kamran is the golden child who can be sneaky, too. Asha herself isn’t much more developed. We’re told she’s recently quit the track team and seems to be going through a more rebellious phase that leads her to… complain about the family's weekly phone-free outing that forces her to give up her phone for what looks like at most 2 hours and make ASMR videos in which she crushes things very slowly. By the way, I’ve never seen an ASMR video, but if the bits shown in the movie are any accurate, they seem more unnerving and even a little creepy than relaxing. The supporting characters outside of the Choudhry family fare even worse and get discarded as soon as they’ve served their purpose. For instance, Asha’s friend, Emily, with whom she seems close, disappears for most of the movie after telling her about Cassidy’s disturbing reputation. Cassidy herself (who has that pot-smoking cynical teenager who looks down on her childish peers look typical of American teen movies but never actually says or does anything weird) disappears after taking Asha to Oliver, the only teenager in town who still has a laptop and an Internet connection. She’s seen again, briefly, in the hospital, after being attacked by Grimcutty, but then we only hear about her from others. After Asha sees the Grimcutty for the first time and talks to Cassidy and another teen who’s also curious about the meme, it looks as if they’re going to team up, maybe even with the other teens in town, but the other teen only shows up at the hospital near the end to relay Cassidy’s fate, and Asha ends up turning to Kamran for help with the online research. By the way, I usually love the research scenes - seeing the characters find out what the hell is going on - but here the research bits were… realistic? Let’s face it, real-life teenagers would probably not fare much better than Asha, Kamran, and Cassidy, though he does get the address of the blogger, Melinda Jaynes, who put the meme out there. She’s of course, Brandon’s mother. Melinda is a mummy blogger who peddles conspiracy theories about 5G and the dangers of the Internet, and whose blog is apparently read by every parent in town. Why would Amir and Leah even take ideas from her? She seems like she’s this close of going all QAnon. She’s also the concerned parent from hell, who locks her son in a padded room to stop him from getting hurt (and presumably stabbing her again). The idea of a mummy blogger brainwashing all the parents is hilarious, but sadly, the movie chose a darker path.

The Grimcutty’s creepiness is inversely proportional to its visibility. It’s all well and spooky when it’s lurking in darkness and its grinning face is seen from afar, but the better we see it, the more cartoonish and non scary it looks, even when he’s making Asha stab herself. At first, I thought the movie was going to blame everything on Melinda, but for some reason, it decided to make the Grimcutty a real, independent thing that she had unwittingly amplified when she wrote a blog post after catching her son looking at the meme. That was a weird choice. The movie had a perfectly good explanation right there but just ignored it. Were the filmmakers hoping for a prequel? But what activates the Grimcutty? Is it the social media obsessed teenagers who spend most of their lives online? No, it’s the parents’ worry for their children! So, every time a parent freaks out about their child and the Grimcutty, it attacks said child, which is why, when a video of a group of partying teens mocking the Grimcutty panic is picked up by a news station as the real deal, there’s a complete massacre at the par… actually, no, only Asha is attacked. So, none of the other parents were worried? Seriously? Didn’t the movie establish that all the parents were losing it with the meme and googling about it constantly? Also, how did the news station got a hold of the video so quickly? They had just filmed it. The Grimcutty’s apparitions are uninspired and dull, and on top of that, it seems pretty ineffectual. Asha is able to fight back and send it away, it fails to choke Kamran to death, and it couldn’t even kill Cassidy after stabbing her on the neck. Whenever it’s necessary for the adults to realize that the children aren’t lying, it ditches the knife and grabs the child by the neck so they can be seen floating in the air. How considerate. But at least in the end, its existence is widely accepted, which I guess is a win for the Grimcutty? At least judging from Asha’s new, irritating ASMR video in which she answers viewers’ questions about what happened to her and her family afterwards, while giving generic advice for parents and children to get along (listen to each other?! Revolutionary!) to keep the Grimcutty at bay. So, everyone just accepted that there is a supernatural killer meme out there, and that it was responsible for all the self-harm and attempted murders rather than the teenagers being affected by some perfectly human, non-supernatural phenomenon like group psychosis or mass hysteria? Doesn’t that basically make Grimcutty a reverse Salem's Witch Trials?

The parents being inadvertently responsible for the titular monster showing up isn’t necessarily a bad idea. It’s a fact that adults often worry too much and are capable of giving in to hysteria when they fear children might be in danger. That’s what gave us the infamous Satanic Panic or, more recently, the QAnon lunacy and its belief that various celebrities are part of an international, paedophile, Satanic cabal. It’s also a fact that some of these self-harm memes turned out to be hoaxes. However, Grimcutty goes so far in the other direction that it ends up downplaying the very real dangers children can experience online. All the children, no matter how old, are well-adjusted, with no need for supervision, and impervious to social contagion, while all the parents are irrational and unreasonable. It’s only after they realize that they should’ve believed their children’s talk of invisible memes coming to life and making them cut themselves that they become acceptable as parents. People not believing others about the very real supernatural threat is nothing new, but the way Grimcutty handles this trope creates some issues. The initial panic about the alleged killer meme is both funny and believable, as is the Detox Box and the parents repeating Melinda’s affirmations. However, it slowly gets stupider. The party video sequence is OTT - it's clear that no one's cutting themselves and that Asha is looking weirded out by the whole thing. Of course, this is when the Grimcutty attacks and makes it look as if she's cutting herself in front of her parents. This in turn, would mean that people would hear that a girl did cut herself at that party even if the video wasn’t true, so it doesn't feel like the parents are going crazy over nothing. Also, even with the implication that Oliver had been watching porn on his laptop, that has got to be the cleanest teen party ever committed to film. If someone said they were all drinking juice and milkshakes, I'd believe it. The edgiest thing Oliver’s guests do is the video, and that's clearly a joke. See parents? No need to worry about your kids hosting parties while you’re away! Leah and Amir’s reactions over Asha writing somewhere (Twitter? Reddit?) that the person who started the Grimcutty panic was Melinda were ridiculous. Didn’t they even read what she wrote? And wouldn’t they recognize the name of the blogger whose posts gave them the idea for the Detox Box? Was the audience supposed to forget about that? Even crazier is the movie picking the one time Amir is justifiably concerned rather than overreacting or being unnecessarily strict to make him the “villain” that must be stopped by Asha before he gets both her and Kamran killed. The scene where Amir reads Kamran’s search history and realizes that he had been googling things like necrophilia and talking to people on the dark web, as his youngest child tearfully explains that he just wanted to know what his friends were talking about was just weird. So, according to the movie, he shouldn’t be worried about that? Not to mention this is all taking place after Amir believed he had seen Asha cut herself and Kamran had nearly died after apparently choking himself after googling about Grimcutty, just like he had been warned about. It’s not crazy that a parent would be worried under these circumstances. And yet, that’s what Grimcutty appears to be arguing. The Amir/Kamran scene does provide a shock almost as big as Brandon stabbing his mother - the realization that Kamran didn’t delete his search history! WTF? Who does that? I always delete mine and I’m not talking to people on the dark web. And what’s with the anti disconnect stance? People of all ages admit to spending too much time online and have talked about how much better they felt after taking a break from it all. Who wrote this? A couple of teenagers who were angry their parents wouldn't let them watch PornHub?

As for the horror, Grimcutty isn’t particularly scary. It’s another one of those clean, glossy horror movies like Killer Book Club (which I reviewed here) though the latter’s violence managed to be messier. I don’t know how to explain it, but they almost look wholesome. Disneyfied maybe? They remind me of Wolverine’s bloodless claws in the X-Men movies, but at least Hugh Jackman actually looked like he was brutally stabbing people and the expectation of violence was a lot lower than for a horror movie. There is blood in Grimcutty, but everything looks fake, which makes it hard to really get into the story. Another movie that came to mind when watching this was the far superior The Babadook, because of the parents’ connection to the titular monster and Melinda/Brandon, who looked like a cheap copy of Amelia/Samuel. Poor Grimcutty, as if its lame killer meme could ever compete with Mr Babadook’s book. Really, that thing still gives me nightmares.

VERDICT

Lame monster, lame scares, average acting - Grimcutty may not be the worst horror movie out there, but it certainly isn’t the best. It’s not offensively bad, but anyone looking to be scared could easily find something better to watch.

By Danforth