Cure

Xual Healing

Cure
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Japan 1997
Daiei/Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers... in as much as I could make out.

Cure is a genre film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to the great Akira) but, having watched it and not fully understanding it... I’d have to say that I’m not sure just what genre it’s in for sure. Certain elements could (or maybe not) concede an almost supernatural bent like a ‘curse/virus’ movie... other interpretations may put it down to having slight science fiction elements. For me, I’m not sure what it’s correct interpretation really is... if indeed it has an intended one. All I am absolutely sure about is that it’s a thriller dressed up somewhat as a police procedural movie.

Now, I’ve only seen one other of this director’s similarly lionised works, Pulse (which I reviewed here) and, yeah, I really didn’t think much of it at the time. Cure, on the whole, is a film I appreciated a little more, I think... and it engaged me while, not quite giving me any kind of wrap up. Now, as a lover of foreign language films, I loved the slower pacing and the lack of spoon feeding of story conclusions but, I did feel a little short changed by this one. More, I think, because there is an extra set of loose threads which people seem to be ignoring, I think.

Okay... so the hook is brilliant. We see a murder which is ‘so not’ telegraphed and performed so casually and brutally (and out of the blue) that it almost acts like a jump scare, right at the start of the movie. A customer murders a prostitute with multiple blows to the head and then carves a big X in her chest/neck area.

Detective Takabe, played by superstar Kôji Yakusho, is called into the case with his ‘psychiatric advisor’ who is helping him on what turns out to be a series of murders he is investigating. Takabe finds the murderer hiding nearby in a hidey hole in the same apartment building’s corridor.

The reason Takabe has a psychiatric consultant is because this is the third victim in a spate of recent killings and in each case, the murderer is easily found nearby and, in each case, the victim has been mutilated and had an X carved into the same region on their body. And in each case, each different killer has no idea why they committed the crime and find the incident as strange as the police inspectors doing the investigating.

Takabe has problems with his wife, who we saw reading Bluebeard during her psychiatric appointment and, seemingly to me, demonstrating slight psychokinetic abilities. Meanwhile, a possibly amnesiac drifter called Mamiya (played by Masato Hagiwara) is encountering people and, it soon becomes clear, is hypnotising them into committing these crimes, which continue to punctuate the film in gruesome ways while the detective finally catches up with him.

A which point you begin to fear for the main protagonist, as well as his increasingly forgetful wife, who seems to be approaching an outward state not dissimilar to Mamiya herself. Things get blurry and it’s hard to tell, in the end, if Takabe has actually killed his wife, who he is currently entrusting to the hospital or, given the dreamlike nature of an earlier apparition of her suicide, whether she is even dead or not (at least that’s my interpretation).

Before I get to the ‘what the heck actually happened’ nature of the ending, I will say that it’s pretty nicely put together and has some beautifully designed frames. Often the director will focus on a person and their space in the middle third of a frame, through a doorway or opening with the walls in the foreground as two similarly thin slats on either side of it. At other times, such as an early beach scene, he moves away from the claustrophobia inducing, crowded slats of this style of framing and instead places his actors in isolation, small against a larger, more tranquil backdrop. So visually and also in terms of the acting, I certainly never got bored.

The ending is... somewhat open to interpretation and so, because I wanted to know if there was a definitive conclusion to be drawn from it, I read some other people’s interpretations. When a waitress serving food to Takabe picks up a knife to kill someone out of the blue, many people are concluding, perhaps correctly, that he has become the embodiment of Mamiya for himself. However, this seems to miss out a few things which might have made that a cut and dried interpretation of the story elements in this one.

Firstly, Takabe doesn’t seem to be actively trying to mesmerise anybody. Secondly, there have been some much stronger, psychokinetically induced (I believe) tremors of late in the hospital where Takabe’s wife is. And thirdly, I can’t quite work out what the connection between the novel Bluebeard and this series of, seemingly unconnected, wave of murders actually is. Fourthly, a number of people seemed to be priming the waitress for her potential action at the end of the movie... were they just asking her customer questions or is there a whole network of these people around?

I don’t know and, sadly, by this point I don’t care. What I do know, however, is that Cure is a pretty interesting film which probably deserves, to an extent, the following that it has in some countries. It’s perhaps a film which doesn’t inspire multiple revisits over a short span of time but it’s certainly something I may revisit someday and I liked it well enough. Worth a look sometime, if you are into late 1990s Japanese genre cinema (although what genre this one is actually in is still up for debate in this case, I feel).