Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
The greatest trick Kiyoshi Kurosawa ever pulled by making this masterpiece is it's inherent behaviour of being metaphorical. The film, dealing with hypnotism and psychosis in the forefront, acts itself as a hypnotic weapon to lure the audience into the film. In this case, cinema becomes the devil itself.
Yesterday, after experiencing a blasphemy in the name of Conjuring : The Devil Made Me Do It, which has the same bottomline synopsis as this one, this felt as a heavyweight monarch of the former film in the initial stages. What turns out to be a turbulent storm of slowburn atmospheric devastation, with adequate dashes of Lynchian elements of Twin Peaks-esque police procedural thriller and a pinch of surrealism. And slowly but steadily, it's the dance of the evil omens that creeps on your shoulders and lurks silently behind the walls of your subconscious mind.
Across the ages, background score has been an instrumental part of the horror genre, even when it subverts to other proportions. This has been an eye-opener to my restricted knowledge of achieving a psychological horror film with the bare minimum usage of sounds, and mostly relying on the devilish beauty of the surround sounds. So much of a strong potential in a film like this, that can be an influential film for the budding filmmakers, wanting to make an indie horror project, with acute dearth of musical dynamics.
Talking about the acting, as been said previously, it's the hypnotism that relies throughout, and it's all for the genre-defining performances of Masato Hagiwara as the antagonist Kunihiko Mamiya, Kōji Yakusho as Det. Takabe, Tsuyoshi Ujiki as Det. Sakuma that bounds one unconditionally onto the screen.
Last but not the least, it's the indomitable editing that acts as the primary element of invoking horror and makes it go down as a visionary state-of-the-art kino in it's genre, cogent as a testament of disturbed minds, instigating that silent darkness residing in generic human psychology.
Yesterday, after experiencing a blasphemy in the name of Conjuring : The Devil Made Me Do It, which has the same bottomline synopsis as this one, this felt as a heavyweight monarch of the former film in the initial stages. What turns out to be a turbulent storm of slowburn atmospheric devastation, with adequate dashes of Lynchian elements of Twin Peaks-esque police procedural thriller and a pinch of surrealism. And slowly but steadily, it's the dance of the evil omens that creeps on your shoulders and lurks silently behind the walls of your subconscious mind.
Across the ages, background score has been an instrumental part of the horror genre, even when it subverts to other proportions. This has been an eye-opener to my restricted knowledge of achieving a psychological horror film with the bare minimum usage of sounds, and mostly relying on the devilish beauty of the surround sounds. So much of a strong potential in a film like this, that can be an influential film for the budding filmmakers, wanting to make an indie horror project, with acute dearth of musical dynamics.
Talking about the acting, as been said previously, it's the hypnotism that relies throughout, and it's all for the genre-defining performances of Masato Hagiwara as the antagonist Kunihiko Mamiya, Kōji Yakusho as Det. Takabe, Tsuyoshi Ujiki as Det. Sakuma that bounds one unconditionally onto the screen.
Last but not the least, it's the indomitable editing that acts as the primary element of invoking horror and makes it go down as a visionary state-of-the-art kino in it's genre, cogent as a testament of disturbed minds, instigating that silent darkness residing in generic human psychology.
Hi... I watched the film yesterday after reading this article and discovered this gem of a slow burn horror that may require some getting used to for audience growing up watching jump-scares like Conjuring, It or Saw. In fact it challanges the whole notion of horror. However, at times I felt the character of antagonist could be explored more and his conversations sounded a bit repetitive. Nonetheless, Cure certainly challanges and outdoes the genre of conventional horror/crime drama films!!
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