Tyler Scrivner

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A boring waste of time and energy that squanders what could've been a really cool concept. Vague spoilers below! I'm not gonna pretend the original "Ju-On" or the American "The Grudge" films are masterpieces but they at least have interesting set pieces and fun chase sequences between the ghosts and their victims. "Origins" is a joyless boring uninterested slog mired by bad acting, bad storytelling, and a bizarre preoccupation with extreme violence against female characters. None of the characters act like real people, everyone seems to be going through the motions because the director and script said so and not because their actions are motivated. There are no scares, there are barely any ghosts, and the ghosts that do appear are lame and boring. The logic behind the "cursed house" rules do not exist; in prior Ju-On installments, if you had contact with the house in any capacity, you are eventually hunted down and killed by ghosts. In "Origins," there's no real reason why some people live, some people die, or some people are possessed. They try to throw some flimsy "oh I'm still alive because the ghosts want me to tell their story" nonsense which does not make sense because stories of these ghosts are well-known graphic murders that everyone apparently already knows! The creators are trying to "say something" about violence by setting the movie in the late 1980s and 1990s by explicitly setting the events during times of violence and death in Japan (notable earthquakes, the sarin gas attack in 1995, etc) but it goes nowhere and is just kind of....there? The only good thing I can say about "Origins" is that the lighting and set dressing were very nice. It's too bad the few ghosts that were featured in the story didn't have more interesting designs.