Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cure

Brief preface: this is a film from 1997, poorly distributed in Italy at the time, only shown on TV on Fuori Orario, never commercialized (neither on VHS nor DVD), but it is in cinemas now, these days, so if you're not familiar with it, go immediately. It's worth it, being one of the most beautiful Eastern (and not only) films of all time.

It's a thriller, a mystery, but it's only an appearance; it is much more. The same director explains it before the film begins (I repeat, you can only enjoy this gem in the cinema): his objective was to shoot a classic American-style thriller, a genre little explored in mid-'90s Japan, yet the deeper he delved into the screenplay's depths (which is based on one of his books), the more he realized he was facing something that disrupted the genre's basic rules. The characters became nuanced, confused, overlapping one another, and the relationship between detective and killer took the form of a sort of macabre ballet, a game of cat and mouse where the roles kept swapping, seemingly nonsensical.

It's an exceptional film for many reasons. It's worth spending a few words on the plot: Tokyo, Detective Takabe (Koji Yakusho) investigates a series of inexplicable murders (prostitutes beaten with rods; wives thrown out of windows; nurses going crazy and killing patients). The perpetrator is a young mentally ill man (Masato Hagiwara) who hypnotizes people and induces them to commit heinous murders (he is a university student obsessed with hypnosis, black magic, satanic cults, and the occult in general); the detective, whose wife suffers from a mental illness (perhaps) similar to that of the killer, becomes increasingly vulnerable as he gets closer to solving the case.

The plot, remarkable in itself, is elevated to an unusual level for the standards of Japanese films of the era by Kurosawa's direction, from whom a masterpiece of this genre was not exactly expected (after all, before "Cure," he had only directed rather negligible genre films): it is not a horror, but takes its form; it's a thriller, but not completely. Violence always arises suddenly, lasts briefly, leaves one stunned, and then moves on to something else. The narrative is fragmented, at times urgent, at times calm, and the horror is a disruption that arises from nothing (and thus is even more frightening). Everyone is a potential killer, everyone can dream of things that do not exist (the detective believes his wife is dead and instead it's just a hallucination), the most common objects (especially the lighter) become objects that could evoke violence or terror, as do elements of nature (the metaphor of water). The suburban and squalid context (never seen a Tokyo so repulsive) increases the tension. Kurosawa builds it brilliantly, sequence by sequence, whether it's a chase between a cop and a killer, or a long tracking shot in a confined environment (above all, the scene of the cop "enchanted" by the flame of a lighter in a tiny, minuscule police station is worth mentioning). He is aided by a splendid, anguished night photography by Tokusho Kikimura.

The references to modern Western cinema ("Seven"; "The Silence of the Lambs") are evident, but Kurosawa blends them with the typical violence of Eastern cinema, as brutal as it is quick and painful. It emerges as a chilling portrait of Japan, a kind of non-futuristic "Blade Runner," terrifyingly real, where streets and buildings blur together and a public toilet could be the scene of an unexpected crime (here the most horrific crime, perhaps, is consumed, where the nurse literally tears the skin off an unfortunate patient's face). An enigmatic finale, all to be elaborated.

"Cure" was at the foundation of the so-called J-Horror phenomenon, Japanese horror films with very strong psychological connotations. "The Ring," to cite the most famous of the genre, was born, grew, and developed precisely thanks to "Cure," a film that would inject such a propulsive force into mid-'90s Eastern cinema that it would completely revolutionize a type of cinematography that desperately needed a shake-up, so to speak, out of the ordinary.

I repeat, run to the cinema. What are you still doing here?