Cure Reviews

Eerie and elusive, this unusually subtle thriller offers little in the way of big scares or intricate plotting. Instead, Japanese horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa opts for unsettling imagery and moody atmospherics. The result is somewhat confounding, but utterly spellbinding. A string of grisly murders have left police detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) baffled. The crimes seem to be unmotivated, the killers make no attempt to flee, and the killings all appear to be entirely unrelated, save for two puzzling facts: In each case, the killer has carved a deep "X" into the victim's neck and chest, and at least three of the killers have come into contact with a mysterious drifter named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara). Takabe hauls Mamiya into the station for questioning, but gets nowhere; Mamiya appears to be a total amnesiac who can't remember from one moment to the next where he is or who he's talking to. Instead of answering questions, Mamiya is far more interested in asking them, probing his questioner's mind with unsettling accuracy. Disregarding the advice of his psychiatrist friend Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), who argues that sometimes killers just kill for no good reason, Takabe is drawn deeper into the enigma as he tries to put the murders into some rational perspective. Pushed to the brink by Mamiya's unnerving behavior and the deteriorating mental state of his own wife (Anna Nakagawa), Takabe begins to suspect that Mamiya has used a form of mind control to turn ordinary people into cold-blooded killers. This quietly disturbing thriller unfolds with none of the conventional trappings of the genre. There's no jarring soundtrack, the pacing is relatively slow, onscreen violence is kept to a minimum (although there are a number of disturbingly bloody moments) and much of it is filmed in medium to long shots, casting a chilly pall over the gruesome goings-on. And in a bold move, Kurosawa also forgoes the conventional denouement, ending this mesmerizing mystery with an ambiguous climax that raises more questions than the film cares to answer. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.)