Blu-ray Review: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Breakout Chiller Cure on the Criterion Collection

Cure receives a superb transfer from Criterion that maximizes its abstruse beauty.

CureKurosawa Kiyoshi had more than 15 years of experience under his belt as a maker of theatrical and direct-to-video films before 1997’s Cure brought him to international acclaim. While certain elements of his trademark style (clinical camera distance, unhurried pacing) appeared sporadically in his earlier work, it was here that his distinctive approach to genre film fully bloomed—an oblique form of horror that unsettles precisely for how much exists outside the frame as much as what lies within it.

The film follows a police detective, Takabe (Yakusho Kôji), assigned to a string of murders where an “X” is carved into the neck of each victim. Each time, a different murderer is found near the victim, behaving as if hypnotized and unable to say why they did what they did. This mystery is only compounded when Takabe tracks down a figure linked to the perpetrators: a man named Mamiya (Hagiwara Masato) who himself suffers from amnesia and can offer little insight into the strange effect he seems to have on others.

Kurosawa approaches the material as an anti-procedural. Throughout, his detached direction gives us every piece of information we need to understand what’s going on but does so without explicitly drawing one’s attention to the pertinent information. Kurosawa has identified Ozu Yasujirô as a key influence, and one can recognize that in the deceptively stark, minimal compositions that are nonetheless precisely blocked so as work up objects and people equally to aesthetic effect. Kurosawa also illustrates the surprisingly short distance between Ozu’s style and the oblique, dimension-distorting camera angles that Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby used to insinuate menace. There’s always a sense of something lurking just outside the frame, and Kurosawa captures a sense of urban rot that permeates even the most sterile environment. Sunlight itself has a diffuse, blotchy look to it, as if it somehow containing black mold.

Cure is regularly billed as a horror film or a psychological thriller, but just as it cannot be accurately called a police procedural, it doesn’t fit neatly into either of those genres. Kurosawa’s film defies classification precisely as it defies definition, regularly skirting around a possible social commentary or insight into Takabe (or Mamiya) just as things threaten to start coming into focus. Instead, Kurosawa settles for generating an ambient sense of dread throughout, a general sense of everything being wrong in some way that cannot be articulated.

Thus one is left to interpret scenes of social malaise (such as the middle-aged man who privately fumes about the service worker he treats with politeness when face to face with him) or rigid domesticity (Takabe and his mentally unstable wife, played by Nakagawa Anna, acting out traditional gender roles at home and barely interacting) without them piling up into an explicit worldview. Cure opts to craft a general sense of wrongness, fusing acting, set design, and camerawork into something akin to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, another film that derives social and existential terror from the elusiveness of the real.

Image/Sound

Kurosawa Kiyoshi and cinematographer Kikimura Tokusho intended for much of Cure to have a murky, impenetrable look, and Criterion’s 4K master honors that intention while nonetheless showing a significant upgrade to detail and image depth over prior home-video releases of the film. The stark sheen of fluorescent light on off-white walls captures the dull but still reflective surfaces with exceptional clarity, and Cure’s descent into grimy shadows never results in crushed black levels. Even better is the flawless 2.0 stereo mix, which adroitly balances the film’s complex and unnerving sound design. The humming ambient noise that gives Cure so much of its subtle unease is woven delicately between dialogue and the soundtrack.

Extras

In addition to an archival interview with Kurosawa that lays out the film’s themes and aesthetic vision, a new interview has been recorded between the director and his former pupil, filmmaker Hamaguchi Ryûsuke. Hamaguchi’s own directorial experience steers the conversation to more specific observations of the depths of Cure’s visual and audio suggestiveness, including a shrewd observation on recurring images of blinking, hypnotizing lights. There are also new interviews with Yakusho Kôji, who discusses his long-running partnership with Kurosawa, and Hagiwara Masato, who speaks of his experiences working on this film. Critic Chris Fujiwara contributes an essay outlining the film’s oblique, haunting approach to horror, likening Kurosawa’s ability to craft abstract feelings with concrete details to the similar approach of Jacques Tourneur.

Overall

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s haunting breakthrough receives a superb transfer from the Criterion Collection that maximizes its abstruse beauty.

Score: 
 Cast: Yakusho Kôji, Hagiwara Masato, Ujiki Tsuyoshi, Nakagawa Anna, Hotaru Yukijirô, Dôguchi Yoriko, Denden, Ôsugi Ren, Toda Masahiro  Director: Kurosawa Kiyoshi  Screenwriter: Kurosawa Kiyoshi  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 111 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1997  Release Date: October 18, 2022  Buy: Video

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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