Cure (1997)

Director:

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Writers:

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (novel)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa (screenplay)

Release Date:

8 July 2001 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Horror | Thriller

Tagline:

Madness. Terror. Murder.

Plot:

A wave of gruesome murders is sweeping Tokyo. The only connection is a bloody X carved into the neck of each of the victims...

Plot Keywords:

Murder | Tokyo Japan | Philosophy | Mystic | Psychological Drama

Awards:

9 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Kôji Yakusho	...	Kenichi Takabe
Masato Hagiwara	...	Kunio Mamiya
Tsuyoshi Ujiki	...	Makoto Sakuma
Anna Nakagawa	...	Fumie Takabe
Yoriko Douguchi	...	Dr. Akiko Miyajima
Yukijirô Hotaru	...	Ichiro Kuwano
Denden	...	Oida
Ren Ôsugi	...	Fujiwara
Masahiro Toda	...	Tôru Hanaoka
Misayo Haruki	...	Tomoko Hanaoka
Shun Nakayama	...	Kimura
Akira Otaka	...	Yasukawa
Shôgo Suzuki	...	Tamura
Toshi Kato	...	Psychiatrist
Hajime Tanimoto	...	Takabe no shachô

Also Known As:

Cure (International: English title)
Kyua (Japan) (alternative title)
The Cure (UK)

Runtime:

111 min | Taiwan:115 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

France:-12 | South Korea:15 (DVD rating)

Company:

Code Red

Goofs:

Continuity: When the detective first goes to Mamiya's apartment, the landlord tells him he has not seen Mamiya for six months. Yet, when the detective enters the dark, long deserted apartment, the "lab" animals are still perfectly healthy. No explanation is offered as to how they survived with their owner gone for so long.

Movie Connections:

References Hana-bi (1997)

Loop

First time I saw this, thanks to an otherwise fine festival director obsessed with Eastern Europe to the exclusion of most neo-eiga, I'd seen nothing by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and, though I realize now I'd seen him in his 1979 debut for Gosha as well as in "Tampopo" and "Kamikaze Taxi," I was incognizant of Koji Yakusho's range or his stardom. "Shall We Dance," I'm pretty sure, played here after "Cure's" festival debut. The festival buzz on "Cure" was scream flick, not director matures, crowds Tarkovsky.

Early in "Cure" Kenichi (Yakusho) comes home to find the clothes washer spinning, stops it, looks inside, finds nothing. A little later his wife Fumie stops him doing some chore: "Let me do it. I feel good today" She means "I'm sane today," but we don't know this, we haven't quite understood her chat across a table with a bearded man in a previous scene. Those words, this line, "I feel good today," to the exclusion of other or even most days, are uttered in pretty much Fumie's tone, one time or another, by nearly any wife. My mother's spoken them countless times, far back as I can recall. Now she's 85, mobile, sane, with a couple of decades likely still in her. Though "Cure," a film of words as much as images, works linearly, it's really a circular film. Repeated viewings pay. You could start at any point within it and watch full round. It's not a suspense film, though it's full of suspense of the moment, of where the camera will go next, of where a gaze will fall, a hand will go, of where and whether a character will turn or pause or not pause.

Because both actors have Koizumi hair, when we first see, at distance, a trench-coated figure walking a beach, we can't be sure it's not Kenichi. The camera won't zoom in on the incessantly questioning amnesiac until after we've placed his voice as new to us. No-Name, later Mamiya, functions as a semantic, a near totally verbal catalyst. If you must, he's "Ringu's" tape, but I kept thinking of the "What Was It You Wanted?" track on Dylan's "Oh Mercy." It's no accident that No-Name's nothing but voice at first. The beach scene's school teacher later babbles introspectively, analytically, tangled up in words, amazed, "Yes. I killed her for no reason." Mesmer makes an okay MacGuffin, but as I say about rope and knots in my comment at "Undo," don't see hypnotism, spell, or trance. See (hear) just words, just questions. Even Mamiya's lighter needs to be named, spoken. The Aum weren't hypnotized. Suicide bombers aren't. Atta's Al Qaeda crew weren't. Zero pilots, willing and not (because it's an infinite world, there have to have been both as well as every gradient in-between), weren't. Whatever was done to any of these was words, language.

Later, in "Séance," Yakusho plays a sound man. Devoid of music, "Cure"s' ambient sound is sometimes so pumped it backgrounds the images. Try closing your eyes for a few film minutes, and only listen. (If you know no Japanese, all the better.) What's there? Rhythms? Randomness? Oddity? The mundane? Tradition? Modernity? I could go much longer than allowed here, but skip to the very last scene, for not a spoiler but an alert. Yakusho/Kenichi's seated in a cafeteria. You MUST see, small, backgrounded, in an obscure corner of the screen, a glint of metal, traveling. Seeing it completes the loop, thrusts you into the beginning of the film. Your instinctive struggle to leave the loop, to understand the glint or even not to have seen it, is Kurosawa's design. Your struggle, his design. That's why I say crowding Tarkovsky. At best they spiral. They turn back or turn in. Kurosawa's "Kairo" works a similar loop.