Most horror films shout at you. Cure (1997), directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, never raises its voice. It maintains a steady whisper and is all the more unnerving for it. A Japanese horror film that was part of the ‘J-horror’ wave of the late 1990s, Cure almost stands outside of it by its ordinary, beige-brown palette and its preference for master shots. Everything unfolds at a distance and the eventual threat – human or supernatural – never takes complete shape like the iconic threats of Ringu or Ju-on: The Grudge. A detective (Koji Yakusho) is investigating a series of murders; the victims have an X carved across their throats and the murderers are ordinary people who cannot remember how they came to kill, often people they are close to, co-workers or family members. A mysterious stranger (Masato Hagiwara) appears on a sandy beach and introduces himself to somebody sketching the shoreline. The stranger is amnesiac and continually asks questions, almost testing the patience of the people around him. There is a link, and a potential connection between the murderers, and the detective and the stranger eventually meet, which the film patiently reveals. Up to a point. Cure is elliptical and never explains everything; it gives a little, often glimpsed, and leaves you with a lingering feeling of unease. What did I just see? What does that mean? The sinking feeling is that even if you don’t understand everything that happened, you know what it means. Great performances, particularly from Yakusho as the cop, who is also taking care of his mentally ill wife (Anna Nakagawa), and Hagiwara as the coyly blank suspect. I had heard high praise about Cure and it snuck up on me. For the first half hour, I was taking it in as an effective detective procedural and yet as it unfolds, or should I say unravels, it remains formally and aesthetically contained, never fully breaking right up until the last shot. Yet the culminative effect gets under your skin and is hard to shake. Available on Blu-ray from Eureka and Criterion Collection; though I saw this through a copy on the Rarefilmm website. Recommended.
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