The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies – Review | Netflix

THE ECHOES OF SURVIVORS: INSIDE KOREA’S TRAGEDIES on Netflix is a new true crime documentary series with eight episodes. It’s related to the In the Name of God docuseries. Read our The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies docuseries review here!

THE ECHOES OF SURVIVORS: INSIDE KOREA’S TRAGEDIES is a new Netflix documentary series with 8 hour-long episodes. Each case is covered over two episodes, so it’s more like four documentary films, and you can easily watch them as such.

This is a companion docuseries to In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal from 2023. That was also a South Korean Netflix production, and it’s best to watch that first. This is more of a follow-up series, but it can be watched on its own. It just isn’t done as well, unfortunately.

Continue reading our The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies docuseries review below. Find it on Netflix from August 15, 2025.

Overproduced theatrics

While I would usually applaud any true crime production that focuses on the victims, I feel like The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies is closer to exploiting them. From the very first episode, the theatrics surrounding the interviews with victims are just too much.

They’ve recreated the place where these people were trapped and abused for years as kids. Now they dress them up in the same clothes they were forced to wear back then, and are confronted with the scenery as well.

It results in tears and desperation, which was obviously the goal.

The fact that they were forced to wear track suits, sleep in bunk beds, and be cruel to one another makes it impossible not to think of Squid Game, which is also mentioned. Clearly and understandably, Squid Game was inspired by the brutal circumstances.

Real life horror in the name of God or greed – often both

Episodes 1 and 2 focus on the Brothers’ Home, which was an actual concentration camp that existed in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s. Officially a “welfare” home, this was a place where people were abused and forced to work till they dropped.

Yes, including kids.

We meet some of these kids as adult Brothers’ Home survivors and hear their stories, which is what I am always curious about. And yet, the setup of these interviews and the need to make them react by confronting them with the very setting they escaped seems cruel and unnecessary.

The Echoes of Survivors also continues looking at the JMS Cult, which was a big part of season 1 of In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal. For a long time, this new docuseries was simply labeled as Season 2 of In the Name of God, before getting the title of The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies.

Learning from your past

What I do appreciate about The Echoes of Survivors is the fact that this Netflix documentary series focuses on tragedies to avoid repeating them. Rather than ignoring them or denying that it happened, they deal with it.

That’s how you learn from your past. You can say “Never forget” all you want, but some people have clearly forgotten and do actually ignore and deny events that happened in the past. Be that concentration camps, slavery, or how any colonizing power has dealt with native populations.

And no, I’m clearly not talking about just South Korea any longer, but many other nations would clearly do well to utilize the same tools. Especially accepting, acknowledging, and learning from past tragedies.

Watch The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies on Netflix now

The Echoes of Survivors is directed by Jo Seong-hyeon. Also, it has the same creative team as In the Name of God. It’s great to see them all return for this companion docuseries. It’s not a Season 2 of In the Name of God, but the series does focus on similar cases.

Also, there’s the one continuation of the JMS case. On top of this, we’re getting three new tragedies covered in this series.

Again, I want to applaud the idea of focusing on victims. I’m just sorry to say I feel that the original documentary series did a better job of this. It’s almost like the success of In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal has resulted in a bigger budget. But not used in the best way.

Officially, it’s stated that The Echoes of Survivors is “Told with care, clarity, and purpose”, which I want to acknowledge does happen. I just really was not a fan of how the interviews were framed. It didn’t sit right with me and ruined a lot of the overall experience for me.

Still, I appreciate the focus on victims and wanting to learn from tragedies rather than ignore them.

The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies is on Netflix on August 15, 2025.