Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.
Day 7: Cure, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Who are you? This is the central question of Cure, and it is repeated over and over to various characters throughout the narrative. Nearly everyone responds with his profession. I am a policeman. I am a detective. I am a doctor. People define themselves by what they do, which begs the further question: Are all of these people murderers?
Kurosawa’s landmark 1997 feature concerns a hypnotist serial killer who murders through the power of suggestion, turning seemingly normal people against their families, coworkers, and countrymen. At one point, a psychologist working with the police tells our lead detective (Koji Yakusho) that a person cannot be forced under hypnosis to do anything he wouldn’t do in his real life. This means that while none of these people would answer the question of ‘Who are you?’ with, ‘I am a murderer,’ in some dark part of their souls, they are.
What makes Cure so disturbing, then, is not that the killer uses some vaguely supernatural psychic power to force good people into committing unspeakably horrific acts, but rather the suggestion that there are no good people. With the right push, everyone is capable of murder. So, what do we call the man who is unafraid to push? Who is he?
That’s the rub. He doesn’t know. At least, he presents himself as an amnesiac. He is nobody from nowhere, which means he could be anybody from anywhere. This blankness, this emptiness is a repeated motif throughout the film. The detective’s wife appears to be suffering from a kind of early-onset dementia – its own kind of amnesia, slowly transforming the woman he loves into nobody from nowhere. The killer speaks of an emptiness within himself, which he says allows him to see what lies within others. A blurred, faceless form recurs throughout the end stages of the film.
The question becomes: If we don’t know the disease, how can we cure it? But, isn’t the killer the disease? No. The killer is a symptom that lets us know there is a disease. The true illness is whatever it is festering in society that would lead a happy husband to kill his loving wife, a good policeman to kill his partner, and a talented doctor to kill a stranger. What in the culture put this bitterness and resentment there inside these people, allowing a monster to exploit them?
This is a brilliant, brutal film, unafraid to dive deep into this question. Perhaps the closest we come to an answer is in the scene when the detective visits the killer (Masato Hagiwara) in the makeshift hospital prison where he is being held. When Yakusho first enters the room, Kurosawa frames it in such a way as to make the room look empty. The detective then starts talking, and it appears as if he is speaking directly to a wall. Kurosawa finally moves the camera 90 degrees and reveals a tremendous negative space, an open bathroom that is as big as the room itself. This is where the killer lives – in the empty space we so often fail to see.
Thus begins a confrontation that is entirely verbal but bathed in tension because we have seen what the killer can do with just his words. The killer’s trick is to get people to admit aloud their pain and hatred and resentment so that he can prey upon it and ultimately suggest the easiest solution. It’s a trap, and the detective falls right in. He reveals everything about the discontent he feels at having to care for his sick wife, at working a job that at its best, shows you the worst of human nature, and at being a faceless man in a sea of nobodies from nowhere.
It is interesting to watch this film for the first time after recently seeing Osgood Perkins’ popular horror thriller Longlegs, which came out earlier this year. That is also a film about a serial killer using the power of psychic suggestion to force others to carry out his crimes. Apart from some game performances and an atmosphere of dread, that film largely fell flat for me. I didn’t feel it played fair with its deployment of the supernatural elements, and the quasi-religious nature of the murders makes it too easy to dismiss the killer as mad or delusional.
In other words, Longlegs took the easy way out. Kurosawa is not interested in easy answers and provides none. There is no cure. His film is far more disturbing and unsettling for it. After all, if anybody can kill and nobody is to blame, then how can we ever be safe?
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