Save Yourselves
This movie hates women. And Japanese people. And logic. And movie-goers.
Onpaku
Director: Shugo Fujii • Writer: Shugo Fujii
Starring: Josie Ho, Lawrence Chou, Kazuya Takahashi, Tomoko Kurokawa, Kazuko Shirakawa, Yoshi Sakou, Daikichi Sugawara
Japan / Hong Kong • 1hr 39mins
Opens Hong Kong August 31 • III
Grade: F
Director Shugo Fujii is, allegedly, some kind of psychological horror savant. He got a fair amount of attention for his 2019 fantasy-horror Mimicry Freaks, a grisly, surreal, child abuse allegory. By all accounts Freaks tromped over the same ground – time displacement, fractured memory, entrapment in an unfamiliar space – as his latest, Onpaku | 怨泊, a psychological-supernatural horror mess co-produced by star Josie Ho Chiu-yee’s 852 Films. The “film” follows a Hong Kong real estate exec and her obnoxious wheelie around Tokyo until she crashes at a minpaku that most definitely does not meet any of the standards minpaku are supposed to, and then gets into it with a cult.
Fujii gets off to a disastrous start with some tired, hand-held navigation of central Tokyo, swarming with grotesque faces and claustrophobic crowds, who turn out to be dangerous, with dungeons in their basements and a strident hatred of foreigners. Okay, so he clearly hates Japanese folks. Later, because you can never have too much violence against women for the sake of a story, Fujii leans hard into rape saga from back in the day. Okay, so he clearly hates women too (enjoy the treatment of professional women). He caps it off with a sustained and convoluted illogic that just leaves you with a headache because he clearly hates movie-goers. The borderline ineptitude of the storytelling and the lack of even a modicum of Filmmaking 101 structure put Onpaku in the running for worst of 2023 – possibly the 2020s. I can count. I know there are seven years to go.
The horror!
When my eyes weren’t rolling so hard I could see the inside of my skull, it would appear Sarah Kwan (Ho, in a stilted performance for the ages) is forced to bed down for a few nights at a gross minpaku run by crazy mama Kinukyo Tanaka (Kazuko Shirakawa, After Life). Her business partner Shawn (Lawrence Chou Chun-wai) screwed up her hotel reservation, the other 150,000 hotel rooms in Tokyo are booked because the American president is in town, and he scandalises her with the suggestion of a love hotel. He sends her to the minpaku. After a restless sleep, Shawn comes back the next day to get to work, but they’re derailed when they find a body under the floorboards. Enter alcoholic, racist cop Oyamada (Kazuya Takahashi), who wants to keep the pair in town because, despite his spiralling career, he’s been investigating the house; a journalist also investigating it vanished a few years earlier. Sarah’s sleep gets more and more hallucinatory, so Fujii’s images get more and more colour-saturated when they’re Sarah’s visions, washed-out when they’re “reality” (I take it back about Filmmaking 101). And that body? Oyamada’s forensic scientist sister Mayumi (Tomoko Kurokawa) finds a flesh eating monkey virus in it or some shit.
That is the tip of a very large, very nonsensical iceberg that sees Sarah getting slowly poisoned and held hostage, cheap shout-outs to Hereditary, The Omen and, I don’t know, Memoirs of a Geisha, en route to a lunatic finale that, had the rest of the film displayed any degree of wisdom, finesse or pedestrian technical skill (Fujii edited too) might have been a fun exploitation thriller. But it’s so sloppy it just leaves questions that shouldn’t even be germane: What happened to the virus monkey that was just laying in the coroner’s lab? If Kinukyo kept talking about going back to Japan, and Sarah speaks Cantonese, are we to believe Kinukyo worked at a fancy Japanese-style brothel in Hong Kong? If Shawn speaks Japanese, why does he bitch about his cab driver not speaking English? Why are The Shining twins there? Why are POTUS’s people not all staying in the same place. Did they just book the space? Is the Hyatt okay with this? And in what may be the most egregious insult to the audience, Ho, and Ho’s character’s intelligence, we’re to believe a presumably high powered property investor (developer? Broker? Who the fuck knows?) sucks at life so hard she can’t find a place to stay? In Tokyo. Why am I even wondering?
Hey, everyone gets to decide for themselves what good taste and good filmmaking are, and what is grounds for personal offence. And in case any of us needs further reminding of that, respectable (if not blue chip) film festivals Hawai’i International, Tallinn Black Nights and Yubari all selected Onpaku for their programmes – if you put any weight into that kind of thing (don’t get me started on Sundance). But a line in the sand must be drawn when a movie elicits a minimum of 5 “WTF?”s inside its first 15 minutes – and not the amused “WTF?”s of audacious filmmaking like Leos Carax’s Annette, or the misguided ambition of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, or anything from Hong Kong’s glorious Cat III heyday of the late-1980s or early-’90s (looking at you, Clarence Fok’s Naked Killer). This is just an old-fashioned sloppy, befuddling, infuriating dumpster fire. Fuck this movie. — DEK