Ju-On: Origins
Ju-On: The Grudge is Japanese horror royalty, spawning a huge series of films and several American attempts at adaptation. So it’s not a huge surprise that the horror franchise eventually made its way to Netflix.
It is surprising how bad it is, however.
I am a big fan of Japanese horror, and definitely appreciated the original film. The American remakes, all of them, were bad, and paled to The Ring, but I was excited to see a new horror series on Netflix based in that world, and heading back to its Japanese origins.
Instead what I found is a show that is brutal and bloody, yes, but also incredibly confusing, not scary at all, and poorly written, edited and acted to such a degree that it is genuinely the worst thing I’ve spent time watching on Netflix in a long while.
Ju-On: Origins tells the story of the “cursed house” for the millionth time, but spans a bunch of different timelines and tragedies over the course of its six, 30 minute episodes, which means it’s effectively a three hour Grudge movie.
Ju-On: Origins
It is utterly incoherent. The main story revolves around a paranormal researcher who teams with a model who lost her husband to one of the house’s ghosts that apparently followed him home. Each episode contains some sort of new, horrific crime, and while no, I did not find anything that happened in this show particularly “scary,” the show goes out of its way to create some of the most brutal crimes I’ve seen in this genre, including horrific violence to pregnant women, children and some disturbing sexual assault.
Weirdly, the ghosts in this series are…almost non-existent. The long, black haired woman of the original iconic series is nowhere to be found, and the main ghost is just…a normal looking woman holding a baby. When people see “scary” visions, it’s usually the blood-covered murderers or victims of past crimes in the house. It is genuinely hard to understand what’s a ghost, what’s a hallucination, what crimes are actively caused by the curse or if the perpetrators are just evil to begin with.
The show is just all over the place. Too many crimes, too many timelines, absolutely no characters you care about, and then zero resolution with an abrupt ending that makes it seem like they’re pushing hard for a second season. But there’s no way I could bear to watch any more of this, I almost couldn’t even make it through all six episodes, no matter how short they were. And not because they were disturbing, but just because they were incomprehensible.
I like Japanese horror. I like Netflix horror shows (The Haunting of Hill House is one of my all-time favorite series). But somehow the two combined here and it does not work at all. I was hoping for more, and no, I don’t care to see a second season. I cannot recommend this to anyone.
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels Herokiller and Herokiller 2, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.
