The Cure

Saw The Cure, a Japanese suspense/horror. It structured itself as a police procedural, following a detective as he investigates a series of ritualistic murders, all carried out by normal people who have no idea why they did it. The source of the murders slowly turns out to be an amnesiac dude who I think is supposed to be a very annoying version of Hannibal Lecter. He masterfully manipulates people by getting under their skin and enraging them. This sounds very sly and clever in abstract, but in practice it manifests as him being incredibly obtuse and frustratingly stupid. If you want a taste of this master-manipulative behavior, just pop on over to 4chan and make a short post introducing yourself. A welcoming committee will be by in no time. In real life, trolling comes off as far less clever and much more dickish.

Anyway, the film is very good at creating ominous moments and implying malign influence. There are times when a character will grab a knife and you internally cringe, sure some shit is about to go down, but no, nothing at all happens. By refusing to fulfill our expectations, the film has increased our discomfort and also our tension. There's a scene where the bad guy smokes a cigarette, the ember at the end lighting up only, lost in his silhouette. I wonder if this scene is meant to invoke Rear Window? The Hitchcock-ian reference would be apt.

In addition to this classy morbidity, there's a dose of grisly gore as well. It's nothing too shocking (nothing worse than, say, CSI) but it adds a lurid note to the motif. At one point the detective finds a monkey's corpse, murdered like the human victims were. The image is flashed again, almost subliminally, signifying that the detective is succumbing to the bad-guy's influence.

I don't want to give away the exact mechanism of the bad-guy's machinations, but his methods are linked to the thrumming, whining noises of modern life. Characters gaze distractedly at flickering fluorescent lights, or listen to washing machines whir, before casually grabbing a lead pipe and beating their wife's head in. The urban ennui seems to trigger the violent behavior as much as any action of the bad-guy. This sense of isolation and modern angst is common in films from Japan, home of the hikikomori. It's used well here.

An interesting film. Fairly scary, but in a subdued, 1970s kind of way. It was perfect for me, but it will utterly disappoint hard-core horror fans. I think describing it as Japanese Silence of the Lambs is as good as you can do. It's fairly similar, but far more subdued and more, kind of, poetic. It's much more oblique and suggestive. It's central baddie is not as magnetic as Lecter, but his miserable jerkiness almost makes him more sinister. You can almost see the detective, after he has let the bad guy get to him, beating himself up, thinking "I fell for that load of crap?"