Cure

Cure (1997) opens with a run of murders in Tokyo. The same mark is cut into every victim's throat: a large X. The killers are different each time; all of them are caught, all confess, and none can explain why they did it. Detective Takabe looks for the connection. The man at the centre is Mamiya. He says he has severe memory loss, keeps asking the same question of whoever is in front of him, and wants them to tell him who they are. It emerges that he is a master hypnotist. By Takabe's theory he plants the impulse to kill through a repeated sound or sight: the motion of water, the flame of a lighter. Kiyoshi Kurosawa shot it at a deliberate distance. A. O. Scott wrote that he turns the thriller into a vehicle for gloomy social criticism; Scott Tobias observed that he undercuts the lurid material by keeping a chilly, almost clinical distance. The technique builds that distance. The takes are long and static, the camera rarely comes close, and the violence is mostly outside the frame or seen from far away. The film is regarded as a foundation of late nineties Japanese horror. It preceded Hideo Nakata's Ring and Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On and set the template for the genre's international spread. Its standing has risen over the years. Ari Aster recently described it as possibly the best film ever made. It runs 111 minutes. Good for: slow horror, psychological suspense, and Japanese cinema. Less good for: the film explains nothing and the ending is entirely unresolved. The pace is very slow and there are no jumps. The killings are cold but graphic, and what the film leaves you with is an unresolved discomfort.