Ju-On: Origins review – Netflix's gory but scare-free Grudge TV show
Since the Ju-On series first slithered on to screens in 1998, it’s taken 13 fulllength films, seven novels, two short films, three comics and one video game to tell what’s essentially a classic haunted house tale on a loop. It’s an overly ambitious franchise, especially within the horror genre, that’s already spawned an American “sidequel” earlier this year and now inevitably, it’s back to curse the only remaining medium it had left: television.
Part of Netflix’s growing investment in foreign language content (it’s proudly touted as its first Japanese horror original), Ju-On: Origins is a strangely positioned addition to the series. Press materials claim it’s based on the “true events” that served as inspiration for the original story but as any genre fan knows all too well, truth is a loose concept within horror and again, here it works more as a gimmick, one that aims to ground the supernatural mayhem with some vague semblance of reality. Long-form horror is difficult to perfect, as exemplified time and time again by shows like The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, creakily stretching plots that would usually unspool in less than 100 minutes into an exhausting number of hours. The merciful decision to restrict Ju-On to just six 30-minute episodes means that its welcome is never outstayed but equally, it fails to linger, a series filled with moments rather than a substantive driving narrative.
Like the many chapters that have come before, it’s focused on an unassuming house in Tokyo, one that’s seen an untold amount of violent acts. Its curse attaches itself to those who enter, leading to madness and murder and Origins attempts to trace a number of characters whose lives are affected in the late 1980s through to the late 90s. The thread tying each episode together is a paranormal investigator who finds himself obsessed with the house for reasons he can’t quite define and a celebrity who suffers a loss as a result of its ghoulish power.
It’s unusually, mostly restrained, more of a drama with heightened elements than a straight horror, a decision that’s the result of a director, Sho Miyake, whose background is far outside of the genre. His artful, lo-fi roots grace the show with a sense of realism and he duly avoids lazy jump scares, choosing a slow-burn menace instead. If anything, it’s at times a little too restrained and while Miyake’s admirable avoidance of familiar tropes is gratifying, his inability to sustain enough of an insidious mood throughout is disappointing. When he does lean into what one would expect from the territory, it’s either clumsy (the “unsettling” paranormal visions are almost entirely flat and distractingly cheap) or discordantly gruesome (one particularly unpleasant act of violence toward a pregnant woman will only be endured by those with the strongest of stomachs). He stuffs the show with a number of strikingly nasty scenes but with ultimately minimal impact. The ensemble cast come and go with speed and while there’s an early intriguing attempt to liken the effect of the house to the effect of being stuck in a cycle of generational abuse, it’s not maintained with enough care to elevate the material.
It’s an odd, not completely unengaging show that tries hard to steer the franchise out of a rut by refusing to regurgitate much of the imagery we’ve come to associate with it but in its place, there’s something of an empty space instead. The effectively staged gore will leave its mark but little else will, a brief burst of nastiness that probably should serve as the last gasp of an overextended brand. Yet I somehow doubt that will be the case.
Ju-On: Origins is available on Netflix from 3 July