Cure

Horrorphile

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Cure

May 4th 2010 00:54

There are some crime dramas that burn like a stogie; slow, intense, flavoursome, but an acquired taste nevertheless. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997) is just that; a psychological horror-thriller that penetrates the mind like an ice-pick wrapped in velvet, its concerns and deeper meaning under layers of doubt and subterfuge. Cure is a hard nut to crack, yet it engages on such a precise and unassuming level, that it’s not until the final scene and the reverberations that follow that you realise just how affected you’ve been as a viewer.

Tokyo, an industrious city in a state of decay, is suffering at the hands of seems to be the work of a serial killer; bodies left mutilated, left with a bloody “X” carved into the neck. But it’s not just one killer, it’s several. Each victim has its own murderer, found close by, suffering from amnesia. Homicide detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is determined to find the reason and truth behind this madness. With the help of psychologist Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), their investigation proves fruitless, until a mysterious young man, Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is arrested near the scene of a murder. He appears disconnected, yet possesses an awesome and deadly power of suggestion over people.

Koji Yakusho as Takabe

Masato Hagiwara as Mamiya

Like his other features director Kurosawa is primarily interested in mood and the musings of the extra-sensory world, yet contained within the unreliable, easily-manipulated boundaries of the human psyche. He poses questions, concepts, ideas, but isn’t prepared to answer them all. In fact he often prefers to leave key questions completely out in the open to interpretation. This can make for frustrating viewing, but just as the cinematic realm of David Lynch expresses; we don’t always understand everything we experience in life – the real world – so why should we understand everything we see and hear in the fictional world of cinema?

This fabric of controlled confusion and obscure perspective is, of course, is hugely influenced and dependent on the intelligence of the screenwriter and/or director. It’s easy to be indulgent on a whimsical level, but it’s difficult when dealing with opaqueness that one tries to keep a certain level of translucency. Kurosawa wrote the screenplay based on his own novel, so as director he knows intrinsically what imagery he wants to illustrate the narrative. I’d like to read the novel, but it’s probably not translated into English.

Cure is a slow-burner, a narrative trait it shares with Kurosawa’s later, more powerful, features, Pulse (2001) and Retribution (2006). There are flashes of visual brilliance, sometimes in the camerawork, sometimes in a static image, and yet while the entire movie is blanketed by the mundane, there is a strange, eerie atmosphere of the supernatural. Cure is a curious creature, a nightmare beast that sleeps, occasionally thrashing out in a slumbered death-twitch, chasing its tail in its dreams.

Cure Koji Yakusho, Tsuyoshi Ujiki, Masato Hagiwara

Takabe and Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) interrogate Mamiya

Decent performances from the core cast, chiefly Yakusho and Hagiwara, round out the solid production values, with special note to a brief, but very gruesome post-murder sequence involving a hypnotized nurse, a scalpel, and her victim’s face. Cure isn’t the most compulsive viewing, but the director’s ruminations on identity, memory - on what it is to exist – resonant beyond the movie, much like the rest of his oeuvre, and that always makes for an interesting effect.