Heading to Hell': the new Korean horror series sweeping Netflix is ​​far from being the new 'The Squid Game'

 Netflix has a secret weapon with the surprises that it produces anywhere in the world and that suddenly become great phenomena. The recent ' The Squid Game ', an addictive South Korean series, became an international sensation in one weekend, lasting several weeks at number one. This has created an unusual expectation for the new premieres created in the peninsula of the platform and the first to arrive has been ' Heading to Hell ' by director Yeon Sang-ho.

The creator of the wonderful ' Train to Busan ' and its underrated sequels brings a very different proposal to 'The Squid Game', an adaptation of a well-known webtoon whose greatest virtue is that its duration does not exceed six episodes , making the survival with killer games and singing dolls look like ' The Sopranos ' by your side. The first episode begins in the center of Seoul, where a man assaulted by three Hulk-like demons who chase him through traffic to pieces, splattering blood, horribly beating him until they “abduct” his soul and leave a scorched corpse.

He never manages to improve his first ten minutes

This first scene, which looks like an extension of the final sequence of ' The Demon's Night ' (1957) or ' Ghost ' (1990) or the climax of ' Drag me to Hell ' (2009), is the main fantastic element of the series but, far from being a starting point of a fantastic universe, it is the best it has to offer and it will limit itself to repeating it in a monotonous and less spectacular way. Although there is a certain violence, the special effects seem twenty years ago and the design of the demons is not terrifying at all , so the greatest asset of the series is Pyrrhic.

The plot of 'Heading to Hell' moves around the consequences of those attacks, which are socially assimilated, thus, in the style of the series' The Leftovers ', the supernatural factor is secondary and causes the appearance of an apocalyptic cult, ' The New Truth ', directed by the charismatic Jeong Jin-soo (Yoo Ah-in), who appears on vigils to explain that the victims are sinners to whom an angel five days earlier - an embarrassing third-hand CGI apparition - tells them they are going to hell.

In a way, the original title refers to the world of Clive Barker's cenobites, who function more or less like reapers of souls, only that here their appearance is not very sinister nor does the series emphasize the relative terrifying elements , with a certain similarity to Sadako's death notice in ' The Ring ' (1998) but little else. The dry claims that the monsters are a manifestation of God's judgment and Detective Jin Kyung-Hoon (Yang Ik-june), tasked with solving the "murder," joins attorney Min Hye-jin (Kim Hyun-joo) , which follows the case of a mother who has received a death sentence from an angel.

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An expendable catalog filler

'Heading to Hell' is a procedural with noir touches and supernatural elements that has all the clichés of the investigator associated with the case, such as the murder of his wife six years ago. Soon the argument is complicated with the appearance of another even more extreme sect that is punishing those who question the divine nature of the events. To some extent, this is a connection to the current validation of internet-driven conspiracy theories and how the pandemic has sparked deniers of all kinds.

But the series is not too brilliant to bear the weight of these subtexts . While the first three episodes are interesting, they seem to tell a standalone story that reboots in episode four with a noticeable drop in quality . The investigation gives way to a series of scenes that are increasingly repetitive and full of dialogues that are not very well written and that lead nowhere.