Diagnosis: Cure

Cure (1997, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa) is a movie about shadows, rumbling noises, the letter X, and finding your inner monster.

I've seen 9 of this guy's movies now and 6 in the past 6 days. Cure might be his most famous.

A string of murders occurs where the victims have Xs carved into their throats. In each case, the culprit doesn't seem at all like a murderer and has limited recollection of the events. Meanwhile an odd young man with amnesia continually flips open his lighter and says, "I don't know who I am. Tell me about yourself."

The movie's pretty creepy and the DVDs do indeed say "J-Horror Classic" on them. But I can't believe people really think of this as a horror movie. It's much more a psychological thriller, or a supernatural thriller, or a detective story, or a serial killer movie, or something else that may or may not be a genre. But picking even one of those wouldn't do it justice. It'd be like slapping a "Classic American Horror" tag on Donnie Darko, Seven, or Memento. The thing that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is best at is mixing genres. And I think he obviously tries hard to do this well, so it must be extremely frustrating to keep getting nailed into some exoticised category with a bunch of really different movies.

But Cure itself is pretty interesting in a few ways. First and foremost is the main detective character, played by the consistently awesome Koji Yakusho. The transformations that this guy undergoes are totally believable and create an extremely complicated main character. He carries the whole film. As always with Kurosawa, the lighting and sound are fascinating. Not brilliant or flawless or anything, just unusual, modest, and effective. And then there's the domestic life vs. professional life distinction that always creeps into his movies, which sometimes takes the form of the ordinary vs. the fantastic. This too is executed very well.

All in all the movie is an interesting psychological study. Don't go into it thinking it's horror or you might be disappointed by its slow pace and lack of thrills. Otherwise it solidly falls behind Tokyo Sonata, Pulse, and Seance as my favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies.



Netflix: 3 stars
Similar to: a low budget Seven, The Orphanage, The Machinist