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).

Yellowjackets

The Eat Is On

Yellowjackets
USA November 2021 - January 2022
Series 1 Ten episodes

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Yellowjackets is a fairly recent American TV show (if streaming can be considered television) in which a group of teenage girls comprising the high school champion soccer team, Yellowjackets, are heading off to an event when their plane crashes somewhere very remote, midst some forests in Canada. The first episode hits the audience right away with how things are going to go, with a scene which, I guess, we’ll eventually catch up to sometime in an upcoming season (if the show doesn’t get cancelled... that’s a big drawback of television these days, shows getting cancelled before their story has finished playing out, thus rendering watching all that’s gone before a waste of time).

The opening scene involves one of the teen girls (we don’t know which one and I had two best guesses, at least one of which was proved to be totally wrong before the end of the first season), being chased by something through the forest... presumably the other teens, who are all obscured by animal skins and seem to have taken the mantle of some kind of witchcraft coven. The girl is killed and then hung upside down, bled out, cooked and eaten by the others.

Then, the back story of the girls (plus three guys) leading up to (for the first episode) the crash and then how they attempted to survive their fate, is crosscut with a new story involving the lives of the four survivors in modern times... Taissa the senator (played by Tawny Cypress), Shauna the housewife (played by Melanie Lynskey) , Natalie the cool one, in and out of drug rehab (played by Juliette Lewis) and Misty, the psychopathic one (played by Christina Ricci). The teenage equivalents of these four characters are played by Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Nélisse, Sophie Thatcher and Samantha Hanratty respectively.

And it’s a wild but very drawn out ride. As we see the girls trying to survive the wilderness with some quite brutal conditions, it’s ironic that it’s the quiet, unpopular girl Misty who is the one who shows them best how to survive. She makes the snap judgements like chopping off what’s left of the coaches leg with an axe and cauterising it so he can live etc. The coach can then, in turn, show two of the party how to hunt with a rifle. Meanwhile, in the modern day, there’s a blackmailer threatening the survivors and all kinds of things from their secret past suddenly coming back to haunt them... there’s also a nice subplot (which is neatly resolved although, I think it needs going back to in terms of a certain person’s real identity) where Shauna... Melanie Lynskey, gives an absolutely stand out performance in this and it’s the reason I kept watching, her comic timing is amazing... starts having an affair with a much younger man, after she rear ends him in the street. Meanwhile, one of the other survivors, Travis, has been murdered in a ritualistic killing similar to ‘the old days in the wilderness’ and the four of them have to pool their resources to find out what is going on.

And it’s a grim tale with some quite brutal blood letting, both in the past and present... and with enough slightly different twists as it goes to keep you interested. This is not like, say, From, where each twist is capitalised and screams at you from the rafters (which, to be fair, is very effective in that show)... this is a much slower burn of a tale. One of the things I really appreciated is that, while it’s building the personalities of the kids in the back story... it really takes its time to flesh out their adult selves with little adventures and the ways in which they relate to those closest to each other. There’s a wonderful moment in the... I think it’s in the first episode... where a marriage counsellor Shauna and her husband are seeing gives them some role play homework to get their sex lives back on track. They give it two goes where, to Shauna’s amusement, her husband's sex fantasy is just a customer coming in to his furniture shop to pick up some new equipment. Seeing these two twice try and act out an improvised role play on this stuff is pretty funny, I have to say. Meanwhile, the senator is sleepwalking, ending up in trees, eating dirt and getting up to all kinds of stuff (she suspects). Much like she did just after the plane crash when one such event was responsible for her girlfriend coming out the worst after an encounter with a pack of wolves.

Another thing is... I’ve no idea where this is going. At first I thought the ‘popular’ girl who was the team captain, Jackie (played by Ella Purnell) was the one who would be chased through the woods and eaten. Well, the story doesn’t develop that far into things by the time of the last episode of the first season but, it’s made pretty clear at one point that she definitely wasn’t the one. My other suspect, a girl called Lottie who has prophetic visions( played by Courtney Eaton), is also possibly not the one if the last few seconds of the last episode is anything to go by... although that’s not necessarily the case. The good thing, however, is that the show doesn’t ever do what you expect it’s going to do... when I figure out the next thing to happen, it either does something completely different or does a similar thing but focused on an entirely different person. So I do appreciate the writing on this one and, yeah, the performances and chemistry between the actors is brilliant.

So, yeah, loved Yellowjackets and would recommend it to people, for sure... my only caveat being that, from the third episode in, they bring in a title sequence and song and, yeah, it’s a truly terrible title sequence, like someone is trying to be really edgy but executed it with all the sensibilities of a child. Maybe that’s the point though but, either way, it’s a pretty good show and I’d get on it if you like horror themed TV.