Horrorfest 2011: Cure

Time for another detective story. CURE is a Japanese film starring Koji Yakusho as a detective investigating a series of strangely similar murders. Victims are turning up with "X" marks slashed into their necks. This at first seems like the mark of a serial killer, but each victim seems to have been killed by a different murderer, usually someone close to them who is easily caught and readily admits the crime while offering little or no motive.

Meanwhile, a mysterious transient (Masato Hagiwara) wanders into and out of innocent bystanders' lives, confusing them with his endless questions repetitive questions. He seems to be suffering from extreme amnesia, and eventually seems to be connected to this string of murders.

CURE builds a lot of suspense and has a definite overwhelming sense of dread throughout, exploiting disturbing sound design to put the viewer on edge. The film moves along at a slow, deliberate pace with lots of long takes and long shots, using pacing and framing to keep the viewer somewhat removed from the action on screen.

This distance between the viewer and the movie is similar to the distance between Yakusho's detective and the other characters in the movie. Yakusho plays a workaholic who attempts to hide his feelings both at work and at home where he takes care of his wife (Anna Nakagawa) who seems to be slowly and quietly losing her mind. As Yakusho gets deeper into his investigation and becomes more involved with the mysterious amnesiac, we get the feeling his mind is starting to go, too. He struggles not only with his sanity, but with his attempts to repress his normal, human feelings.

One interesting aspect of the film is that the central villain is more annoying and frustrating than he is evil and frightening. As played by Masato Hagiwara, the villain here is not suave and charming like Hannibal Lecter or cold and brutal like various slasher monsters. Instead, he seems to enjoy passive aggressively taunting his victims and the investigators as a petulant child might. This is both a unique approach to a villain for a movie and, I suspect, a fairly realistic one -- rather than building up the criminal as some kind of misunderstood genius or otherwise romantic figure, he's revealed to be little more than an anti-social weirdo you wouldn't really want to hang around.

The film has a frustratingly ambiguous ending, and there are several theories floating around about what it might mean, but like the last episode of the SOPRANOS I think all that stuff is secondary to the mood and tension the film creates while it's rolling.