Written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Chihiro Ikeda
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Yūko Takeuchi, Teruyuki Kagawa and Masahiro Higashide
Japan, 2016
CREEPY is not just a clever title. This movie is, indeed, creepy. Specifically, the guy at the center of it is creepy. How many times can I say creepy? Creepy.
Hidetoshi Nishijima plays a former police detective who left the force after a particularly unpleasant encounter with a criminal. He's now teaching criminal psychology, but gets drawn into investigating an old case involving a family that mysteriously disappeared. Meanwhile, he and his wife have moved into a new neighborhood, where they meet their next-door neighbor (Teruyuki Kagawa), a strange fellow who seems friendly one minute and deeply unsettling the next. This is the creepy guy I was talking about!
This guy is one of those people who makes you uncomfortable without necessarily doing anything you can point to as obviously threatening. He doesn't seem to understand normal social boundaries, and every interaction with him feels a little off.
Kagawa is great, switching between awkward friendliness and barely concealed menace. He's the sort of guy you'd probably dismiss as just a weird neighbor, even as you're yelling at the people in the movie to stay away from him. The cop “hero” of the movie even says, if he seems creepy, he must not be bad news, because the real creeps seem normal.
The movie was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who made CURE and PULSE, both featured in previous Horrorfests, and he's good at creating an atmosphere of dread out of ordinary situations. Here, the suburban setting becomes increasingly sinister as the two mysteries begin to overlap.
At 130 minutes, CREEPY is probably a little longer than it needs to be, and there are times when I wondered why some of the characters were making such questionable decisions. But the movie's effective enough that I was willing to go along with it. The villain certainly lives up to the title, and that's more than enough to make this one worth checking out.
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