Cure (1997)

 

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Kôji Yakusho as Kenichi Takabe; Masato Hagiwara as Kunio Mamiya; Tsuyoshi Ujiki as Makoto Sakuma; Anna Nakagawa as Fumie Takabe; Misayo Haruki as Tomoko Hanaoka; Yoriko Dôguchi as Dr. Akiko Miyajima; Denden as Oida

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Disarmingly chirpy music plays over a man beating a female sex worker to death with a pipe, and that is the only unsubtle moment in all of Cure, the one moment which is lurid in its intentional creepiness. The rest of this film is one whose legacy is part of a slow burn which follows seemingly random killings by people oblivious to why they committed them. There is a mystery man in the centre of all this introduced early on, one no one should give a lighter to, a cigarette or even allow access to water for, someone whose vagueness in his motives become as much part of the disquieting core of Cure.

This is considered the breakthrough film for Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who had been before working since the early seventies on shorts, in the early eighties for his first few theatrical films. Pinku erotic films, a 1989 horror film Sweet Home, lost to licensing but whose videogame tie-in is held as a huge innovator for the survival horror genre, even a whole TV movie franchise called Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself (1995-6) all came before, but Cure was a film who helped paved the direction for a working director into his future legacy. The premise is that you could find in any genre film, something of a huge virtue to Kiyoshi Kurosawa as his films, even his more drama based works, have very easy to grasp premises, but their tones are what stand out. He has even talked about his interest in genre films, so the passion was here, Cure explicitly in tribute to the American horror movies he grew up watching and able to capitalise at that time in the Japanese film industry to tackle such a film¹. In this case, it is a crime thriller with overt horror tones where, with these mysterious killings transpiring, detective Kenichi Takabe (Kôji Yakusho) finds himself trying to figure out these random killings. Cure however becomes a film which perturbs, all in spite but befitting to those films the director-writer grew up with.

Takabe's situation is a tightly winding coil. His wife, due to psychological injury, has a lack of short term memory, lost in a past before with behaviors of someone needing extensive care and therapy, such as repeatedly turning on the tumble dryer with nothing within it. His training as a police officer, as he talks of, is to bury his emotions, which becomes a challenge against a mysterious figure, later learnt to be a medical student named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) who, as the antagonist, is almost a cipher in his existence. Mamiya is a no one who seems oblivious to existence, asking the same questions over and over, until it is clear he lulls people into traps.

It is a spoiler, but early on it is explicit that hypnotic suggestion is the cause of these murders, but Cure’s tone crawls under the skin, its sedateness bristling in an increasing dread. Cure is not an elaborate film in style, exceptionally subdued as was to become Kurosawa’s trademark even with a short film like Beautiful New Bay Area Project (2013), a production which was a tribute to martial arts action fight scenes. All his films even with the supernatural are grounded in reality, even here in Cure when the gruesomeness of this scenario is not held back from. The murders, where a police office can suddenly point blank shoot another, is implicitly shown as people’s darkest emotions being unlocked, their angers or thoughts and grudges taking over as they are unaware of what is happening in their actions. This is more uncomfortable in moments, like the husband who had nothing but seemingly love for his wife he kills, and in little pieces as Kurosawa’s film becomes increasing more disturbing.

Thanks to films like Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa became an acclaimed auteur, beyond genre films to the likes of Wife of a Spy (2020), his thoughtful period thriller set in World War II with the same DNA from this film, where he is respected as a director who easily slides into genre and dramas with ease. Pulse (2001) was another legendary film, another breakthrough for him if Cure had not succeeded, as a supernatural ghost film which managed to be even more unsettling in its slow burn released not long afterwards. Cure is a pure horror thriller, but it stands out in how its growing sense of dread escalates. The premise, not overtly loaded in moral themes nonetheless becomes so for subtext in how it deals with neurosis and blocked violence in people if allowed to be let loose. Even the concept becomes virus like for those who get involved in the investigation, so no one is safe. When you see the growing back-story of Mamiya's life, it opens likes layers of an onion and yet will never be fully answered, only with the work of Franz Mesmer the one clear guide, a real German physician who developed the concept of "animal magnetism", an invisible natural force (Lebensmagnetismus) possessed by all living things, including humans, animals, and vegetables, which would later influence the concept of hypnotism in his own "mesmerism" acts to cure patients. It is befitting, considering the disturbing force which holds sway on people, even those who spread its influence, especially as the finale ends on a frankly supernatural centre, a Dr. Mabuse-like voice on an old phonograph cylinder, literally a voice, behind all this as we will never find the true culprit, only those who followed this chain. As was Pulse’s central ghosts, who followed rituals which were unnatural but made sense, this makes Cure scarier and more powerful. That Mamiya acts like he is helping people, when cognisant, unloading their anxieties even if it means killing people, adds to this discomfort.

The sleight of hand Kurosawa has, where his talent was on display, is when the quiet filmmaking style is toyed with; the first time, where there is an abrupt and unseen before jump cut in the editing, to a caged monkey, and Takabe experiences a horrible nightmare scenario, is where you see the mastery of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Trying to review a film in text is at times a perverse act, and here it is especially the case as, unless I gave up the entire premise and spoilers, I cannot explain more, and yet that in it would miss the point of what Cure managed, able to explain less than what the film wishes to never disclose to the audience. The best thing to do is, simply, to watch Cure, as even with all the plot details explained, this is one of those cases where plot details are meaningless explained out of context, where the tone and what is implicit is where the talent of the film’s craft, and when it buries itself in one’s flesh, is felt as a dread.

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1) Embrace the role of chance in filmmaking, says Qumra Master Kiyoshi Kurosawa, published for the Doha Film Institute on March 29th 2020.

Beautiful New Bay Area Project (2013)

 

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Mao Mita as Takako, Tasuku Emoto as Amano

Canon Fodder

 

Of all the projects you have never expect from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, though he has made some beautiful ones himself as well as terrifying examples, a martial arts short film commissioned by the Hong Kong International Film Festival is still unexpected. This is still in mind to a director who began in pinku cinema and like a lot of his generation juggled genres, connectable to even someone like Takashi Miike in terms of being both V-Cinema (straight-to-video) veterans who have been eclectic in their creative output into the modern day. But martial arts in cinema involves a lot of additional choreography and planning even separate from a director who can transition between horror like Cure (1997) to dramas. Contextually though, what the short film is makes sense in his world.

The set-up is that, becoming love sick for a female labourer named Takako (Mao Mita), the president of an urban planning company named Amano (Tasuku Emoto) becomes obsessed with her whilst he is the acting head of a new development project at a wharf. His is not a pleasant romance, as she is not interested and his decision to steal her name tag from the employee board, rather than the prologue for a cute romantic comedy, leads to her having to retrieve it back even if her skill in martial arts have to be used, beating every security guard and grunt before him. For what is a genre film in less than thirty minutes that is playful, Beautiful New Bay Area Project is still idiosyncratic and part of Kurosawa's themes, with a lot to still unpack. Set in terms of modernising an industrial area, we have an idyllic new project to completely rehaul the environment which is demonstrated by even having its own model diorama in the offices. This is obviously the kind of utopia future architecture, no matter how much the management says is good, that is to hold with suspicion. The office itself is septic white and looks build from easy-to-deconstruct materials. It has an atmosphere but is obvious cold to the real, working factory and wharf environments which Takako hails from.

She herself, in a monologue to the camera, talks of having been born from the sea like a mermaid, a figure of working class who is juxtaposed to the coldness of an office urban world that, when an unseen mouse appears in the front office, causes all the staff to flee in terror regardless of who they are. Japan has had a fascinating balance between its heritage, its old history and culture, and the most advanced of modernism, but that does not mean that the schism has been a problem to tackle in its art. Kurosawa has tackled this before, his horror film Pulse (2001) imagining if the dead interacted with the living, and took over the world through the internet, as much a metaphor for the isolation of people as it was a literal apocalyptic scenario. Beautiful New Bay Area Project is, for all intense purposes, a fun spin in a genre the filmmaker has never dabbled in, but this is prominent. As is the fact that the management and officer workers are literally divided from the working class by tape, as there is a hint of a norovirus that Amano is isolated from by his goon-like management and the vans he is whisked off in.

Amano is in another scenario the character who you gain sympathy for, told he is a cog who needs to work in the machine to keep it working, his achievement with all the cogs more important than he the individual piece, which is explicitly told to him by an aide. He becomes, as he says himself, the cog which has broken off, but in a twist, he is not sympathetic at all. His love for Takako is sick, and the transgression to steal her name tag, stealing his identity, offends her. Licking it is definitely not acceptable and just gross unless she was to have consented to it. This presents the other idiosyncratic aspect that, when the first fight comes mid-way through, this is still a martial arts fight film. You need to remember that for a film for the Hong Kong film festival, the country with its rich history of martial arts cinema, Japan has its own which shines here that may not be prominently talked of in their entertainment. Not as much talked of, Japan has a history of elaborate fight sequences. Most will know of it if they know the tokusatsu superhero sub-genre, particularly all the shows into the modern day like the Ultraman franchise where costumed heroes fight monsters, or the history of Sonny Chiba, a cult hero in cinema who founded the J.A.C (Japan Action Club) school for stunt and martial arts performers for his nation's cinema. If you have least seen Chiba's iconic film The Street Fighter (1974), brutal and blunt is the best way to describe the action in Bay Area Project, not of elaborate flips but the credible ways a smaller woman in the female lead can take down men twice her size.   

The fights when they come are exceptional, and Kurosawa to his credit remembered to golden rule to not compromise them by editing or cheats. In fact, the odd juxtaposition of he making a film like this makes one wish he would have continued in this genre, as his themes and tone adds to it. He, for me, likes long scenes and static pauses, which against the stark modern office where the chaos breaks out makes the sudden explosion of violence more striking, the glass tables and white corridors real in the harshness as a person's head collides into them or for Takako to move around, be it by grappling or kicks or biting or keys to the leg or fire extinguisher to the head, to survive.

That the short is that, short, is not detracting. Sadly, this is the type of work in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's career that could be easily missed or forgotten; never even hearing of this until approaching the production for this review, it is a fascinating piece, and in all honestly Mao Mita as a female action lead in itself would be enticing if she had ever continued from this sole film credit. A shame either way.

To the Ends of the Earth (2019)

 

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Atsuko Maeda as Yoko, Shota Sometani as Yoshioka, Tokio Emoto as Sasaki, Adiz Rajabov as Temur, Ryo Kase as Iwao

Canon Fodder

I am going to make a wild prediction that this film will be held as an obscure tangent from the director who broke through, after an already long career, with Cure (1997) and carried on by hard work (and prolificness) gained a reputation for cineastes. I hope it is not buried under the celluloid carpet, but it was unexpected to have a very conventional "stranger in a foreign land" narrative from him with abrupt musical moments where the lead Atsuko Maeda bursts into song. If anything, I have softened my initial reaction to the film. It shows, thankfully, Kurosawa has a light side, which considering his career has tackled a lot of bleak content, might suggest other life to his creative ideas. It is also not surprising as, from pink cinema to horror, he belongs to a wave of directors from Japan, given auteur status or just admired, who came from an industry of having to continually working; this work ethic means Kiyoshi decided to take any opportunity here, an Uzbekistan-Japan co-production, commemorates 25 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries and the 70th anniversary of the Navoi Theater in the capital Tashkent¹, and at a least a try.

Shot in Uzbekistan, this is a country which is not greatly seen in cinema at all; in mind to its history under the Soviet Union, they do have a Soviet Union-era cinema history and a post-Soviet Union cinematic history in the modern day as well that would be fascinating to see. Sadly, an inherent problem with To the Ends of the Earth, whilst I will compliment the moments this succeeds, is that it is solipsistic. Following a Japanese TV documentary crew, filming the sights of the country as eccentric backwater, with Atsuko Maeda as the put upon host Yoko, it does feel like a Japanese film entirely about its Japanese characters rather than trying to engage with its environment. It has an obvious premise which can still work - with a language barrier and being forced to work with a contrived scenario, Yoko stuck in this "cute" and very empty documentary where they are not getting any decent footage - but it really does not feel fleshed out. It is to the point that, even thought Kiyoshi Kurosawa is not a director known for a distinct visual style, even the presentation feels lacksidasical especially with the potential of the environment, a sea-less world of Uzbekistan with its hilled countryside and a different culture entirely from Japan squandered.

Virtues are found. When Kurosawa is trying to analysis his environment fully a few times, he still manages some things of note. The initial project of the production crew is shown as empty; not really engaging with the locals beyond their interest in cuisine or trying to catch a fabled fish, leaving the potential for a deeper context to be found. Some of it plays as a clash of cultures even within Uzbekistan, where a fisherman suggests the fish is being scared away by Yoko as a woman being there, but the Japanese are not engaging either, as Yoko herself finds when, in her first attempt to break from the suffocating position she is in, she encourages them to buy and release a domesticated goat back into the wilderness.

The best scene is when, as much exploited by the director of the TV documentary, she is forced to ride the same theme park attraction over and over in succession, spinning her repeatedly vertically. It is to the point even the amusement park owner, despite being an older man who demandingly thinks she is actually a child by mistake, is right to be as concerned as onlookers are about the foreigners exploiting their own. It is a scene that shows Kiyoshi Kurosawa's talent, the scene that redeems a lot of the failings of the film in one perfect sequence, as with its length deliberately dragged on, to the point I wondered who (if not a fake stand-in) was forced to ride the actual machine. In its real time you see the agony of the experience as Yoko eventually has to go throw up, only to switch back on her "cute" excited female presenter character, all to pretend for a take she has only just finished the ride once, not suffered it at least three times beforehand.

The best character as well is their translator Temur (Adiz Rajabov), a local who became obsessed with Japanese culture and tries particularly with Yoko to be the most gracious of hosts to these people to his land. In fact, part of his back-story to his fascination with Japanese culture, it potentially sets up a great finale involving the Navoi Theater, part of the reason the film was made, even if Yoko has already been there before midway through, a building which was built with the help of forced labour of Japanese prisoners of war after World War II, a landmark which could have had a greater emphasis on in terms of these countries interacting for this film. What little you get of this film trying to stretch further out to the country it occupies is engaging, including when Yoko gets given a small personal camera to film whatever she finds, leading to shaky handycam footage of market stores which is engaging. Unfortunately, the film does not do this often enough.

Instead, To the Ends of the Earth feels stiff, sadly as much due to it being pivoted on the lead character Yoko, who is not that engaging at all. A stranger in a strange land, actress Atsuko Maeda does however feel like she is in her own bubble, despite large portions of the film being her character wandering around the cityscape even at night, separate from her crew in her own existential crisis. Even her plot feels thin, including a piece of a boyfriend back in Japan who is  a fireman, a random melodramatic point he may have been killed in a huge fire seen on television not fleshed out to impact.

The two musical segments are abrupt and peculiar. They are interesting if anything, for they do break the reality of the film and feel unpredictable with a burst of creativity; like Kurosawa's abrupt jump into martial arts action cinema, for the short film Beautiful New Bay Area Project (2013), what he does here offers a tantalising sense that, yes, a man most known in the West for thrillers, horror films and dramas could actually pull off a musical in his own logic and we would all wish to see it. The first is literally within a dream, in the Navoi Theater mentioned before when an orchestra suddenly materialises and Atsuko Maeda starts to sing, but the last for the final scene of the film does place itself into the musical realist world as a sudden, swift jolt with her singing directly to the camera too but more pointedly done. Does this add anything to the film however? Not necessarily, even if Yoko's original dream to become a singer is brought up for her character, and the scenes done are executed well, they feel like fragments of plot which does not use the musical sequences fully and leave them segments in their own separate reality.

I would like to see the film again, in spite of these harsh criticisms. I have become more interested in films more as art through the people who created them, so I can see myself warm to this more in spite of all these comments I have make being very true and unfortunate. To the Ends of the Earth as a result, if you envision this a gamble like rolling dice at the craps table, is a case of the director of Pulse (2001) trying but failing on this roll. It does not mean he has not succeeded before with risks, and he is capable of further risks in his career as a veteran which will likely succeed. As in the first paragraph, I will see this film quickly become an obscurity in his career to ponder over.

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1) HERE

Halloween 31 For 31: Pulse (2001)

From https://i.jeded.com/i/pulse-kairo.11479.jpg

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Screenwriter: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Kumiko Aso (as Michi Kudo); Haruhiko Kato (as Ryosuke Kawashima); Koyuki (as Harue Karasawa); Kurume Arisaka (as Junko Sasano); Masatoshi Matsuo (as Toshio Yabe)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #36

After witnessing so many horror films with constant, badly done jump scares and bombastic music ruining the tension, there's what would be an absolutely breathtaking change for me to see Pulse again, and how meditative in mood it is in vast contrast to other horror films from the time, if it wasn't inherently more disturbing here for me. Where in having a ghost merely appear onscreen and wait patiently in the background, or a phone call where the words "Help me" is spoken in the politest way is heard has more fear to it because it represents a sense that the ghosts have no need to chase people, merely to haunt them. Neither is it a fake sense of time of the first Paranormal Activity (2007), which fast forwarded to the scare between shots of people sleeping, but a prolonged sense of time passing where you have to wait and feel the scenes completely. Quite soon into Pulse ghosts or supernatural sights constantly appear but the ethereal pace makes it acceptable, the hauntings unsettling more having to feel the length of scenes continue over longer than in other horror films.

Pulse's plot is quite an expressionist one as it goes along, adding to this nature, where the cause of the ghosts infecting the real world is clear (the internet) but the implications are wider and more difficult for us and the characters to understand. About the internet becoming possessed by the ghosts of the dead, causing people to commit suicide and others to simply disappears on mass, the events of Pulse are vague with a deliberate obscurity with two separate protagonists having rationalise a strange apocalyptic circumstance. Kudo Michi (Kumiko Aso), who is unfortunate to have discovered a friend's body after he's hung himself, who with her friends investigates a computer program he had only to be pulled into the increasingly paranormal occurrences taking place in Tokyo around them. Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato), a laidback economics student who naively invests into learning how to access the internet, only for his computer to become possessed, turning on and off through its own will and taking him to a site with a person with a black bag over their head and asking if he would like to meet a ghost. The resulting narrative leaves a great deal to be guessed, from titbits brought in as events become worse and the population starts to vanish leaving empty streets.

Mythology of rooms barricaded with red construction appear where, if entered, leads to the witnesses to be doomed, playing on the idea of temptation as these rooms start to appear in greater numbers, naturally in areas isolated that would normally never be of interest except for the visceral colour of red tape, a bold colour in a film with an exceptionally (and intentionally) dank palette. The notion of death is unsettling in this film in general where the victims eventually become a mere black stain where they vanish or killed themselves, whilst screens on computers show apparitions in their rooms flickering in and out of reality in utter isolation, a disturbing sense of despair felt throughout as these figures and victims connect by the internet but are stuck in their own hells asking for help. Pulse is even able to get away with a exposition dump in the middle of its running time as a result, from a character only seen a few times, who explains the afterlife has ran out of room for the dead and they've spilt into the living world, because its merely a potential reason for the seismic events happening, two characters eventually left to follow as they're stuck with witnessing the end taking place not with a bang but with a whimper. The result is more troubling and disturbing in what is not witnessed, and also in what is merely matter-of-fact. The most disturbing moment of the film is not a chase scene or blood being split, but a character witnessing a ghost the other side of a claustrophobic room appear in a vague form, like a memory fading, only for them to be able to be touched, and to be able to stare someone down with clearly defined eyes and rationally tell them of their reality.

From http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1do4uUGfK1qay58d.jpg

The metaphors of computers alienating people is openly discussed, a character calling the connection between people online a fallacy. What's more clearer now the computer technology shown is vastly outdated is a greater sense of general ennui about post-post-modernism, the moment after the Millennium as digital technology advanced where a sense of great disconnect from other people would be felt more. Considering how the image of Japan as a technology hub is actually more complicated than Westerners may presume - cutting edge technological advances but barring mobile phones many people having never used a computer still -  - there's a greater emotional register where modern life and how it drains people becomes literal, becoming black ash as they feel the only emotionally connection in their lives to the undead and their invisible eyes, cameras showing people on their own computer screens from behind that are entirely invisible to us the viewer when one such victim cradles it lovingly.

The aesthetic look is vital for this, great and naturally lit drab urban centres and places where, even in the open, the lifelessness before people vanish is suffocating. A once full amusement arcade, for example, when its empty is a place of machines, from a Street Fighter II cabinet to coin games, merely making noise and bright colours without need for human figures to play them, useless in context of no one being within the environment. As with another Japanese work from the same era, the animated series Serial Experiment Lain (1998) where computers are giant room consuming entities where people can literally enter the internet through, the basic metaphors can be amplified for a more profound notion of the anxieties people had for centuries of disconnect enforced even more now people can communicate through wireless tech without being in the same room. The sense of bleakness is felt through the atmosphere of the almost grey or white rooms and industrial warehouses of the world around the characters, adding a greater sense of a complete lack of connection between people which takes on apocalyptic implications.

The apocalyptic notion is briefly seen near the end, empty streets and a burn-out car minimalist examples, the mere snippets enough to affect the viewer. The only real flaw with Kurosawa's perfectly disturbing work is the early use of CGI, mainly for one single moment near the end of a burning airplane falling out of the sky, a little blemish on a film whose elusive nature is not necessarily obtuse but a lingering, palpable sense of dread matched by uncomfortable scares which drag out. The rest is more carefully put together - the ghost boy inexplicably found in a library who merely stands and looks from a corner of an aisle, a chair or two following a person in a computer room, a ghostly woman tripping and regaining her balance to go after someone slowly in mere strides - little details which become more terrifying as the ghosts are not interested in pursuing their victims or being frantic, but merely appearing anything and effecting a person in their mere prescience. Pulse as a result is a horror film of a great, terrible future as depict in a carefully controlled, quiet fright.

From http://basementrejects.com/wp-content/
uploads/2012/12/kairo-pulse-ghost.jpg