Dis­cov­er the hyp­not­ic mys­tery of this nihilis­tic thriller

“It’s not good to work too hard. You look sick­er than your wife to me.” In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, police detec­tive Tak­abe (played by Koji Yakusho in his first of many roles for Kuro­sawa) is told this by the psy­chi­a­trist of his wife Fumie (Anna Nak­a­gawa). Help­less and con­fused, Fumie is appar­ent­ly suf­fer­ing some kind of demen­tia, leav­ing it to Tak­abe to look after her when he is not try­ing to solve a bizarre series of mur­ders. Yet in a film whose very title is sug­ges­tive of ill­ness (and its alle­vi­a­tion), Fumie’s symp­toms – dis­ori­en­ta­tion, bouts of for­get­ful­ness – are shared by sev­er­al oth­er char­ac­ters, includ­ing both the strange amne­si­ac drifter Mamiya (Masato Hagi­wara) and at times even Tak­abe himself.

If the sick­ness that Cure is explor­ing seems all at once to be soci­etal and spread­ing viral­ly, then the crimes that Tak­abe inves­ti­gates appear entire­ly anal­o­gous: a spate of mur­ders, all per­pe­trat­ed by dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als who con­fess at once but are in a daze as to what they have done and why, and all involv­ing vic­tims whose necks have been slashed open in a dis­tinc­tive X pat­tern which ​‘marks the spot’ as the com­mon sig­na­ture for oth­er­wise appar­ent­ly unre­lat­ed acts.

As Tak­abe tries to deter­mine what con­nects these ser­i­al killings (com­mit­ted by a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of one-time killers), he is drawn to Mamiya, a for­mer psy­chol­o­gy stu­dent with a spe­cial inter­est in mes­merism. If Mamiya is the mas­ter manip­u­la­tor, he is also a flop­py-haired lost boy, all the creepi­er for being utter­ly unas­sum­ing. The impres­sion remains that Mamiya, for from being the ulti­mate puller of strings, is as bewil­dered and entranced as those whom he has under his spell – just anoth­er link in a long chain of per­plexed homi­cide and vic­tim­hood that can be traced back at least to the begin­ning of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, if not to the very source of Japan’s hier­ar­chi­cal structures.

“No one can under­stand what moti­vates a crim­i­nal, some­times not even the crim­i­nal,” psy­chi­a­trist Saku­ma (Tsuyoshi Uji­ki) tells Tak­abe near the start of Cure, ​“No one under­stands.” Kurosawa’s film is not real­ly a who­dun­nit in the tra­di­tion­al sense, but it is cer­tain­ly con­cerned with broad ques­tions of why – even as its nar­ra­tive is built around an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion between crim­i­nol­o­gy and psy­chol­o­gy (with a whole nation in the con­sult­ing chair).

All the seem­ing­ly unmo­ti­vat­ed mur­ders in the film expose a soci­ety of polite respectabil­i­ty and com­pli­ance on the sur­face, and bare­ly sup­pressed rage beneath, with the ​‘cure’ for this repressed con­di­tion a com­bi­na­tion of dis­place­ment and pro­jec­tion. Divid­ed between con­cern and frus­tra­tion with his ail­ing wife, and a dri­ven deter­mi­na­tion to do his job, the ​“in too deep” Tak­abe embod­ies the psy­cho­log­i­cal schism that Cure diag­noses in its many char­ac­ters. But the fact that he alone wears his anger on his sleeve makes him unusu­al­ly resis­tant to Mamiya’s malign influence.

“Even if you man­age to hyp­no­tise some­one, you can’t change their basic moral sense,” says Saku­ma. ​“A per­son who thinks mur­der is evil won’t kill any­one under hyp­not­ic sug­ges­tion.” And yet almost every­one who cross­es paths with Mamiya proves open to his dead­ly sug­ges­tion, trig­gered by the young man ask­ing insis­tent­ly, ​“Who are you?” It is as though Mamiya’s exis­ten­tial ques­tion cuts to their very being, bring­ing out what is already inside them. What Mamiya ​‘cures’ in them is mere­ly their inhi­bi­tions and the trap­pings of social and cul­tur­al norms – and what remains under­neath, exposed through their sub­se­quent action, is a calm­ly naked aggres­sion, and a desire, no longer hid­den, to do harm.

Mamiya is obsessed with an unknown late 19^th-cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Mes­merist who was prac­tis­ing his art at a time when it was viewed with sus­pi­cion as ​‘soul con­jur­ing’ and asso­ci­at­ed with the occult. Kurosawa’s film, too, blurs the line between psy­chi­atric ratio­nal­ism and the super­nat­ur­al, as it uses the remote work­ings of hyp­no­sis as a metaphor for more abstract tra­di­tions of influ­ence. By the end, it leaves view­ers in some­thing akin to a hyp­not­ic state, unclear where real­i­ty ends and delu­sion (whether indi­vid­ual or col­lec­tive) begins. Kuro­sawa shoots long, bring­ing to his poten­tial­ly sen­sa­tion­al­ist mate­r­i­al the unnerv­ing­ly plain, unfussy and aloof style that would come to char­ac­terise all his lat­er work.

Cure is an increas­ing­ly hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry piece where mur­der­ous­ness is a dis­ease spread­ing rapid­ly through the sus­cep­ti­ble Japan­ese psy­che. And where those who, in fail­ing to con­front or act on their own repressed desires, avoid the sick­ness, also risk becom­ing just anoth­er part of its aeti­ol­o­gy. The results are chill­ing­ly nihilistic.

Cure is released in Dual For­mat Blu-ray/D­VD by Eure­ka! as part of The Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma series on 23 April.