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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Relentlessly bleak descent into inner secrets, 13 Jul 2006
This slow, mesmerising (sorry) film is one of the best and creepiest I've ever seen. I highly recommend it to all Japan film fans, who MUST get it, and to those into the psychological and serial killer genre.
For those who aren't into Japanese cinema, don't judge it against American movies of the same type. Whereas American actors are taught to emote hysterically, mugging constantly and exaggerating every movement, and whereas American directors believe that the way to engage an audience is to keep piling on unrealistic action, or gruesome close-ups, or shocks with a machine-gun regularity, the Japanese style is quite different. It's based on a slow, brooding, accumulative prescence of evil that is so understated you might get the impression that nothing actually happens. Like the first "Ring" movie, this is a journey into a pervasive threat that creeps up on you from behind, footstep by slow footstep. It doesn't once leap out and shout "boo!"
The performances are excellent, the directing assured, and the story deeply unsettling. As for the ending, well it's probably the bleakest of any movie of this type. Again, most American serial killer movies like to end by reassuring you that the world is back to normal now, despite the personal changes to the characters. Not in "Cure". There is no doorway back into the light. Be warned. When the credits begin to roll, with no fanfare, you'll be shocked, dismayed, and scared to death. I just stared at the screen in disbelief.
A series of murders is baffling the police. Each victim has a cross slashed across their throat. The perpetrators are colleagues, family members, and they have no idea what happened. It soon transpires they're being mesmerized into committing these acts by a drifter, a creepy and highly manipulative young man who appears to have lost his memory. The drifter's gift appears to be to drag out of the inner depths of ordinary people their deepest emotions, and to enable them to unleash them on people they've secretly resented for years.
All this preys most heavily on the detective assigned to unravel the mystery. At first he seems just like us, an ordinary man grimly struggling on with his life. We see him caring gently for his wife, who is slipping into mental illness. But as he too is exposed to the drifter in the course of his interviews with him, we see the repressed impulses beginning to emerge. He lashes out in frustrated violence. As his wife declines, his thoughts begin to turn to the knives in his kitchen.
"Cure" is such an unsettling, thought-provoking and bleak movie that it demands a lot from an audience. It seems to imply that all it takes to turn a suppressed hatred into an act of violence is a small nudge from a charismatic outsider. There are clear resonances here of religious fanaticism, government-sanctioned wars, and of course the Tokyo subway gassings. "Cure" is frightening simply because we all know that given the moral permission, we'd all be picking up the knife.
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