There's a point in conspiracy movies when you know the battle is lost, when the schemers have murdered all the witnesses or destroyed all the evidence, as in The Bad Sleep Well and The Parallax View. In paranoid Sci-Fi pictures like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it's the moment when we find out that too many people have been possessed, that the invaders have won. Cure maintains the uneasy feeling of this moment throughout most of its scenes, never completely crushing the hope that the hero can defeat an almost indefinable menace, one that police and doctors can't define until it's too late.

Told in a crisp and uncluttered style that reduces many scenes to splendidly designed single takes, Cure makes us feel as if we're eavesdroppers on events that can't be explained in words. Many scenes are observed from the next room or at a discreet distance, yet we're fully engaged in every detail as we follow Detective Takabe's search for the answers to horrible crimes. The amnesiac Mamiya is outwardly harmless-looking. He has the potential of being a Japanese Hannibal Lecter, a powerful mind bent on committing his atrocities indirectly through other people. Mamiya describes himself as empty and is such a sponge for the feelings of others that he often appears telepathic. Like Hannibal Lecter, he develops a unique relationship with our hero, one that we fear can have only one outcome.

The picture has a couple of brief but startling gore moments but relies mostly on a sense of creeping dread, for what might happen if this epidemic of mass murder gets out of control. Working from his own novel and script, director Kurosawa brings in elements of ghostly influence and the hint of supernatural involvement, using an engaging method. After a certain point, learning more about Mamiya becomes near impossible, because anyone in contact with the mind-warping Svengali begins to experience hallucinations and other adverse effects. One certainly walks away from this macabre thriller with a sense of unease.

HVe and The American Cinematheque's DVD of Cure is an admirable job with an enhanced image that gives us a rich picture to contemplate. The good encoding is not super-sharp, but with Kurosawa's clean images we hardly notice. The music score starts with a couple of engaging melodies and stays an active part of the soundscape even after boiling down to some sparse tones and presences.

The disc comes with an interview with the director (in subtitled Japanese) in which he talks about Japanese 'V-movies', the equivalent of our straight-to-video shows and the details of his career (he loves to shoot in dilapidated buildings). He derived his formative notion for Cure from the idea that our personal identities are neither rigid nor unchanging, that we're influenced by whom we live with and love. His 'villain' may use hypnosis, brainwashing, or possession to impose his warped psychosis on others, but for all practical purposes the process seen here is simply one's identity being influenced by the personality of another. Kurosawa stresses that an individual, personal identity isn't a traditional Japanese concept, which gives the movie an interesting cultural context. He also identifies his generation as 'in between' the older WW2 generation with its set ideas, and the new younger one that seems to believe in their hobbies and interests as ends in themselves. He's an interesting guy.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Cure rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Very Good
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Trailer, Director interview
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: January 16, 2003