1h 28min  2022 

Sarah (Josie Ho) has come to Japan seeking to buy an investment property and to have a brief and restful holiday after a bad break-up with her boyfriend. Everything has been precisely arranged in advance; from the schedule, to the hotel, to the real estate broker and the site visits. Immediately after her arrival things start to go terribly wrong, and she has no choice but to stay at a minpaku, an old school Japanese Airbnb-esque way of renting out rooms from private residences. However, this minpaku is seemingly abandoned and looks very dilapidated, straight out of a JU-ON movie. When Sarah checks in, she finds that it’s run by an elderly woman who bizarrely seems to recognize her and in fact seems to have been expecting her. So do some of the other guests…

As Sarah becomes trapped in-between two worlds, another protagonist enters the picture–A grizzled police detective who gets sucked into a missing persons case that soon reveals a string of bloody murders. ONPAKU soon becomes a surreal, hypnotic psychosexual and paranormal cornucopia, a cinematic blender of late ’90s J-Horror, especially V-cinema (direct-to-video) horror movies that were the foundation of such classics as THE RING and JU-ON: THE GRUDGE.

Genres         Horror

Director       Shugo Fuji

Starring        Josie Ho, Lawrence Chou, Kazuya Takahashi

Trailer      2'08"