Creepy | Little White Lies

Creepy

23 Nov 2016 / Released: 25 Nov 2016

Three Asian people standing in front of a house, a man in a grey suit, a woman in a yellow dress, and an older man in a black t-shirt.
Three Asian people standing in front of a house, a man in a grey suit, a woman in a yellow dress, and an older man in a black t-shirt.
3

Anticipation.

Expectations tempered by the monotonous Journey to the Shore.

4

Enjoyment.

Kurosawa returns to his sinister roots with a brutal serial killer yarn.

3

In Retrospect.

The stuff nightmares are made of.

Kiyoshi Kuro­sawa returns to form in this men­ac­ing and styl­ish psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller.

We’ve all had that bad feel­ing before. Inter­act with enough peo­ple in this world and some­one ends up giv­ing you the willies. With­out pin­point­ing exact­ly why, your gut screams, Run the oth­er way!’ But do you? Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new ser­i­al killer yarn, Creepy, embod­ies this conun­drum from the start. The title is meant to be a bla­tant­ly inad­e­quate descrip­tor for the unclas­si­fi­able actions of a per­son act­ing out­side society’s nor­mal social graces. How we inter­pret (and under­es­ti­mate) these uneasy feel­ings con­jures up ques­tions about our worldview.

In the film’s crack­er­jack open­ing sequence, Detec­tive Taku­ra (Hidetoshi Nishi­ji­ma) inter­ro­gates a cap­tured mur­der­er who dis­cuss­es his own ver­sion of moral­i­ty.” Moments lat­er the smil­ing sus­pect slash­es two addi­tion­al throats with a fork dur­ing an escape attempt before being gunned down by police. Left rat­tled by the expe­ri­ence, Taku­ra quits the force, begins a new job as a pro­fes­sor of crim­i­nal psy­chol­o­gy, and moves to a new house with his wife, Yasuko (Yûko Takeuchi).

Almost imme­di­ate­ly the couple’s fresh start hits a few road bumps. Their reclu­sive next-door neigh­bour Nishi­no (Teruyu­ki Kagawa) is the epit­o­me of a walk­ing con­tra­dic­tion, one moment kind and effu­sive and the next an aggres­sive bul­ly. While sit­ting idly in the library after class, Taku­ra dis­cov­ers an old cold case file about the inex­plic­a­ble dis­ap­pear­ance of three fam­i­ly mem­bers who fell off the map years pre­vi­ous leav­ing only a young daugh­ter behind. With the help of a for­mer col­league, he begins to inves­ti­gate on the sly. Old habits die hard.

Dur­ing an uncom­fort­able inter­view with one eye wit­ness, Taku­ra con­fess­es, I always con­fuse work with per­son­al inter­ests.” Kuro­sawa illu­mi­nates his character’s trag­ic flaw when the sit­u­a­tion with Nishi­no grows increas­ing­ly uncom­fort­able. We see tell­tale signs of the mixed char­ac­ter­is­tic” ser­i­al killer arche­type men­tioned dur­ing a lec­ture, yet every­day dis­trac­tions seem to dilute Takura’s concern.

Creepy has a cold pre­cise­ness that stands in con­trast to the director’s pre­vi­ous fea­ture Jour­ney to the Shore, a messy melo­dra­ma that jumps illog­i­cal­ly between dif­fer­ent points in a fuzzy dream state. No such lev­i­ty can be found here. Men­ac­ing cam­era move­ments help track char­ac­ters through rooms, some­times antic­i­pat­ing their loca­tion before they even arrive. Kurosawa’s exper­i­men­tal light­ing also adds anoth­er psy­cho­log­i­cal dimen­sion, as is the case with a bril­liant inter­ro­ga­tion scene that echoes one found late in Louis Malle’s Ele­va­tor to the Gallows.

In terms of fram­ing, Kuro­sawa stays in pris­tine wide angle until a humdinger of a close-up. His aes­thet­ic, like the charis­mat­ic vil­lain, exper­i­ments with dif­fer­ent forms of ver­bal and visu­al manip­u­la­tion. This is capped off by an insane­ly impres­sion­is­tic use of rear-pro­jec­tion in the final act. The film may play its hand a bit too ear­ly from a nar­ra­tive stand­point, but this mani­a­cal sense of style keeps things on edge even after key rev­e­la­tions. While Creepy nev­er attains the ter­ri­fy­ing ambi­gu­i­ty of David Fincher’s Zodi­ac or Bong Joon-ho’s Mem­o­ries of Mur­der, it’s a dev­il­ish reminder that sin­is­ter forces could always be close by. Just look out the win­dow and wave.

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