not as good as all the hype

A Disappointing Continuation

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Blistering performances.

Wow. This was my first Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, and what an incredible experience it was. This is art at its finest. It's been over seven hours since I watched it and as I am writing this, my heart still palpitates when recalling the mesmerising images and scenes from the film. 'Cure' is a film that blends multiple genres into a unique cinematic experience akin to the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock and Andrei Tarkovsky. In fact, I'd put Kiyoshi Kurosawa up there as one of the greatest filmmakers in world cinema.Koji Yakusho plays a detective investigating a series of bizarre murders across Tokyo in a superb and emotional performance. Masato Hagiwara delivers an absolutely chilling performance as the mysterious Mamiya. Kurosawa's camera work allows the viewer to witness the subtle changes in Mamya's body language and the results are absolutely terrifying. It's his eyes: cold, lifeless and sinister.The story itself comes from an intelligent script written by Kurosawa, combining a crime mystery with film noir, horror, psychology, philosophy and social criticism. The atmosphere can only be described as a unique mix of Lynchian terror, Hitchcockian suspense and Tarkovskian or Kubrickian ambiguity. The music itself consists of ominous ambient soundscapes and rumbling drones which is a great deviation from orchestral scores.Each scene, each shot is so well filmed. The camera work is pretty much perfect. Kurosawa's direction is absolutely masterful, delivering beautifully shot long takes, some lasting more than five minutes, to allow the viewer to soak in the atmosphere he has created on screen. Kurosawa clearly has an eye for the camera and each scene is so well shot and edited, evoking a kind of dark beauty to the screen.This is not strictly a horror film. David Lynch is known for incorporating elements of horror in his works, but isn't strictly a horror director. Kiyoshi Kurosawa should be considered the same. There is horror, but this horror isn't overt; it is subtle and intelligent. I've heard the average movie goer say that Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining' wasn't scary, simply because they were expecting jumps, gore and other cheap tactics to scare the audience. Little did they realise was that Kubrick was making a deep, cerebral psychological story. So if you like your films cerebral, ambiguous, deep and different, then 'Cure' is highly recommended. It will likely stay with you long after the end credits.

Koji Yakusho stars as detective on the tail of a murderer who uses other to do his deeds.Mysterious killing is going around Tokyo, the method are similar but the suspects are all from different walks of life. Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) is on the tail of the suspect who he suspects is using hypnosis to make others kill. Him and his psychologist friend Sakuma begin to profile the suspect. Investigation reveals that the suspect used to be a psychology student and was studying about Mesmer.Koji Yakusho won the 10th Tokyo Movie Festival Male Lead award with this movie, and has become a regular in director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's movies since then.The movie has no punctuation point which makes it weak. There's only gruesome killing and unusual suspect to carry the whole story. There is nothing behind the motive, or why the suspect became what he is. This makes the movie fizzle without a bang that should have been there for such a mystery. A very dark movie that could have been lot better if the motive and the cause was better fleshed out.

This movie is another very good psycho thriller from Japan that convinces with a weird and intriguing story and a strange and haunting character that is closely related to brutal murders that are happening where seemingly normal people kill in the most brutal way and don't remember anything before their crimes neither the reasons that made them do them.The special thing about this mysterious movie is that the murderers are not evil but that something inside them made them evil. Is it a demon? Is it a conspiracy? Is it the money? The main question of the movie is what made people commit the crimes and the next questions are: What is the strategy beyond those murders? Why do people kill or are forced to kill? The final question is also very interesting and leads us to a once again disturbing ending of an extreme movie: How can one stop the murders? How can one control the evil that men do? Is there a "cure"? Beyond those thoughts, one could ask: If it can't be stopped, to what kind of conclusion does that ultimately lead? All the movie long you keep on guessing and you get slowly prepared for a haunting conclusion.In many ways, this movie reminds the works of Cronenberg and especially of David Lynch's great "Twin Peaks" series that ask the same kind of questions. While those series convince with a slow development and very charming characters, the personalities shown in this Japanese movie are not always completely convincing and the main idea is nothing really new but those two points are the only ones that I could critic negatively as the movie has a dark drowning atmosphere and is always filled with suspense and mystery and entertaining until the very last scene. I can only recommend this weird and haunting movie and any other Asian psycho thriller I have reviewed before if my review is intriguing enough for you to check this movie out and you happen to like it.

I think it is important to distinguish Cure from the avalanche of white-face-ghost-girl Japanese horror flicks that followed in Ringu's wake. Purely because it's a different beast and lumping it in a convenient J-horror niche is doing it a disservice. I won't go into plot specifics because it's only a skeleton for Kurosawa to hang his atmospherics. That said, I can understand the complaint many viewers seem to share ("man, it doesn't make sense") but without having any claims on solving Cure's riddle, I'm satisfied with letting wash over me, one watch at a time. Kurosawa wisely doesn't attempt to explain his plot. He's content to lift the veil just enough for us to sneak a glimpse in before he disorients again. The plot slowly builds through little tokens that are never followed by an orchestral crescento to signal their arrival. They just happen. A small photo in a book, muffled words on a phonogram, an old video, the ramblings of an amnesiac, theories on 18th century Austrian doctors. In the course of the film, everything seems to be coming together only to remain elusive in the end. In that aspect I find Cure to be closer to Last Year at Marienbad than your average Ringu clone. It's not about making sense, it's about pushing limits within which you can. It's about soaking in the impression it makes. When muffled words come through a phonogram, they're more incoherent ramblings than a telegraphed plot solution; but they contribute just as well to the overarching feel. This elliptic mentality is abetted by Kurosawa's choice of a slow, deliberate pace and many long shots, entire scenes covered without any cuts. The gritty and rundown aspect of Tokyo is photographed like a more naturalistic version of David Fincher's work and does the job well.It's my impression that a surrealist air hovers above and at the heart of Cure, at times reminiscent of a more languid version of Lynch. It is undoubtedly a horror movie so don't be put off by my Resnais comparison, but it's as much bleak as it is subtle and leaves enough to the mind's eye to make you carry it out with you.