We're living in the world of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 'Cure'

How a singular Japanese thriller about disconnected serial murders defined the times—and perhaps saw the future.

The wave of Japanese horror films in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s—which, in turn, led to a wave of English-language remakes in Hollywood a few years later—is usually said to have started with Ring in 1998, an international sensation that Gore Verbinski would turn into a hit in 2002. With its huge hook of a premise about a cursed video tape that would kill its viewer seven days after watching it, Hideo Nakata’s film set the visual terms for an emerging movement: An association between technology and the supernatural, pale ghosts whose twitchy gaits evoke disruptive glitches in bandwidth, and backstories of abuse and psychological pain, a device that has now manifested itself in post-mortem restlessness. While J-horror directors were by no means working off the same template—Takashi Miike, for one, was rattling off a half-dozen horror films a year, and only his 2003 film One Missed Call seems to belong squarely to the category—the shared tropes were  recognizable enough to feel like a trend. Films like Ju-on: The Grudge, Pulse, and Dark Water would follow, all of them remade (poorly) as PG-13 cash grabs in Hollywood. 

The year before Ring, however, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure was both standard-setter and anomaly, a genre-straddling curio that established some of the visual language associated with J-horror while also disrupting the serial killer movie and suggesting a tear in the social fabric. Though Kurosawa would later direct Pulse in 2001, arguably the scariest and most sophisticated of all J-horror films, he would not remain wedded to the genre and he certainly wouldn’t make them all the same way. Before Cure, Kurosawa had cut his teeth on V-Cinema, a direct-to-video market that had served as a kind of film school for other filmmakers of his generation, including Miike and Nakata, and had made six entries in a series called Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself in just two years. I’ve not seen any of those films, much less seen any arguments for their greatness, but Cure does feel like the work of a director who has internalized the rules enough to violate them. 

The timing of Cure coincided uncannily with the publication of Haruki Murakami’s book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, which was released in Japan in 1997 but didn’t get attention in the U.S. until Vintage put out a translation in fall of 2001, only a month or so after Cure opened in New York. Underground was about the sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, when members of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult carried out a coordinated mission to release sarin on three separate lines during rush hour. Thirteen people died on the day (more would follow later), and nearly 1,000 would suffer temporary vision loss, but Murakami’s book suggested the impact on Japanese society was profound. The interviews of ordinary people collected in Underground revealed a populace struck by disillusionment and disconnectedness, as the harmony of modern society had been shaken to the core. And the motives of the cult itself seemed to be a hole in the center of the story, cast aside as the act of evil extremists rather than a question worth exploring. 

Though Cure doesn’t reference the Aum Shinrikyo attack directly, its unsettling premise and overall mood seem connected to the same phenomenon Murakami was trying to explore. Like the subway attack, the murders in Cure are connected to the mesmeric will of a single man, but carried out by a seemingly random assortment of perpetrators. Though they are not disciples of this ring leader, as members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult were to its founder, Shoko Asahara, in both cases these are plainly horrific crimes that they would not have committed on their own. But in the midst of these killings, which the police obviously struggle to piece together, Kurosawa also registers a chilling ambience that has spread, almost like a virus, to the culture at large. What makes Cure special, apart from the novelty of its scenario, is how much energy Kurosawa directs toward a tone of loneliness and emotional and spiritual detachment. 

Produced not long after David Fincher’s Seven made the grim, existential serial killer thriller en vogue again—though most would leave the grimness in and the existential part out—Cure scrambles up expectations from the start. The first murder is carried out with such startling nonchalance that we don’t expect it at all, which may be why Kurosawa uses an oddly jaunty score under the sequence. An ordinary-looking businessman grabs a piece of water pipe from under a street tunnel and later, in silhouette, beats a woman to death with it. Later, the man is found outside of his apartment, naked and shivering in a crawlspace, and under questioning, he cannot recall anything that happened. 

For Takabe (Koji Yakusho), the lead detective on the case, the perp’s testimony becomes part of a pattern as other bodies surface: The killers all have no recollection of what they’ve done and no previous indication that they were capable of such violence. Their ranks will include a doctor, a teacher, a policeman—all archetypal participants in society. The only overlap between the murders, other than the temporary amnesia, is the gruesome “X” that’s been carved into the necks of the victims. The mystery is not only perplexing for Takabe but personally resonant, because his wife (Anna Nakagawa) also suffers from amnesia, and there now seems to be little separating his home and work lives. Eventually, the “devil made him do it” argument doesn’t hold up as the murders spread around the city, and he and his partner (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) start to explore the possibility that the murders are being orchestrated through hypnotic suggestion. 

In the film’s signature sequence, a school teacher is sketching on the beach when an eccentric young man, who we’ll know later as Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), starts asking him questions. “Where is this?” he asks more than once. “What’s the date?” “Do you know who I am? I don’t know who I am.” When the teacher takes him back to the small place where he lives with his wife, the questions continue as the teacher tries to sort out his identity. With the flick of a lighter, the tables start to turn and now Mamiya has lured his host into a highly suggestible state. Later, the teacher is discovered after he leaps out of the second-story window, having found his wife dead seemingly by his own hands.

It’s not until many bodies and failed theories later that Takabe finally gets his man, but that, too, is an enigma that neither he nor the film can solve. There’s no ideology to Mamiya, no apparent malice. He is a cypher, bereft not only of memory and conscience, but of an identifiable soul. Forcing people to kill on his behalf might make more sense if he needed to remove himself from suspicion—imagine Strangers on a Train, only with no criss-cross murders and an entire caboose full of hypnotized recruits—but his choice of perpetrators and victims seems entirely arbitrary, and his motives obscure to the point of unknowability. He spreads evil like a contagion. 

As much as Cure feels like a horror movie, there are few sequences you can point to as conventionally scary out of context. There’s just an air of malevolence,intense despair and loneliness that hangs over the film like a dark cloud that never dissipates. In a film full of random incidents of mayhem, Kurosawa’s use of sound becomes an extraordinary binding force, connecting not only the random murders but also Takabe’s domestic troubles, which are all made to seem of a piece. One feature of his wife’s dementia is that Takabe always comes home to the rumble of an empty washing machine, a reminder that she’s going through the motions of being a housewife as if by rote. That same rumble floods the soundtrack after the beach scene, when Mamiya is inside the teacher’s home and the sound of the crashing wave slips into an ambient thrum. Between Mamiya and his wife, Takabe is trying to access a psychic space where the amnesia blots out the past and the future portends death. 

It feels like the world has caught up with Cure, which ends with a truly astonishing coda that suggests that the death cult can persist without its leader. Even a trip to the dry cleaner for Takabe becomes another piece of evidence that society is coming apart at the seams. Here’s a film in which rational people, with normal jobs and home lives, are thrown into a state of total dissociation and cannot reconcile their actions with their sense of self. Whatever ballast social institutions have in maintaining order has been lost in Cure, and confusion and free-floating dread have rushed in to fill the vacuum. Kurosawa bottles that feeling with Cure. And now, it often feels like we’re living it.