THE CURE |
| CREDITS: Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cast: Koji Yakusho, Tsuyoshi Ujiki, Anna Nakagawa
& Masato Hagiwara. Japan 1997. INTRODUCTION: Debuting at the Edinburgh Film Festival was this X-Files inspired thriller from Japan. Intrigued? You will be. SYNOPSIS: Inspector Takabe finds himself teamed up with psychologist Sakuma and heading up the investigation of the strangest case of his career. A series of murder victims are discovered across Tokyo, each has the same MO and each has an X cut across their throats, but each has a different murderer, usually a close friend or relative who has no memory of the incident. REVIEW: Just when you thought the serial killer flick had been plumbed to its depths Kurosawa finds a new direction in which to spin it. Although far from his debut this is the 43 year old director's breakthrough film in the west and it shows the sort of promise that may one day put him on the same level as his namesake, the recently departed Akira, but he has a long way to go yet. The visuals are uniformly superb, the visceral nature of the story is brilliantly augmented by the darkened sets and grimy locations. While the story is at times somewhat difficult to follow it is held together by some brilliant performances, courtesy of a cast that is, to a man, excellent. This disturbing film is to an extent an extension of the emergent themes of "Shall We Dance" in showing a society that is discarding its traditional guiding mores and manners. Kurosawa, a former sociology major, however takes a far more dystopian view than that shown in Masyuki Suo's charming masterpiece, by portraying a decadent society in which a charismatic can lead the population to murder, not a million miles from the recent spate of attacks on the Tokyo subway by the Aum cultists at the behest of their blind leader. An uncharacteristic entry into the cannon of Japanese movies that proves that the Kurosawa name lives on. Mutt's Rating: **** |