Cure

CURE   ***1/2

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

1997

IDEA:  A Tokyo police detective investigates a mysterious case of a man who hypnotizes his victims into murder.

BLURB:  The concept of virality in so much horror fiction involves not only the fear of infection and transmission, but the instability of boundaries. Even when the ostensible contaminant seems to come from without, as in Cure, what is being transmitted is usually a contagion that was there all along, traveling within social and psychological structures it exposes as far more porous than we’d like to believe. Mamiya, for all his seeming alterity and strange malevolence, does not so much introduce a virus as draw out what is already insidiously contagious within late-20th-century Japanese society. Kurosawa teases out these sociocultural toxins with as much disquieting, methodical rigor as Mamiya lures his victims, piecing together a chilling portrait of a citizenry bound by emotional repression, obedience, historical amnesia, and self-negation. What is passed between the characters in and across the hushed frames — typically long-take wide shots that assume a perspective of clinical omniscience — is a condition of susceptibility. The self is contingent, not only on the social systems it operates within but on day-to-day encounters, influences, and suggestions that accumulate over time. It’s in these quotidian moments Cure locates its truly unsettling existential horror: the implication that just about anything, whether a vexingly gnomic drifter or a certain sensory stimulus, can alter consciousness. Kurosawa does his own subliminal magic on the viewer’s consciousness through constant doubling, mesmeric motifs (trickling water, flashing lights), elliptical edits, and a subtle ambient soundscape that make us question our perception of events. After all, what is film but a kind of hypnosis?