Cure

Around fifteen minutes into writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure, our perspective character, Koji Hashimoto's police detective Takabe, strolls into a brightly lit dry cleaners on his way home from work. The clerk apologises to him, indicating that he is already busy with another customer. As the clerk disappears into the back of the shop this other customer, a haggard looking salaryman, begins mumbling to himself. This strange, murmured autocommunication is a stream of pure venom. Takabe glances at him, taken aback, then stares straight ahead as this blank-faced professional loses himself in a whispered, discursive invective. Initially, and based on the subtitles present, this rambler appears to be addressing absent colleagues who've disagreed with his way of approaching work. He then changes tact, directing his hisses at an absent clerk who has, maybe, lingered too long picking out the man's laundered clothing. The salaryman snarling the kind of accusatory insults that basic propriety demands he otherwise keep to himself. 

When the clerk returns, apologising profusely, the salaryman accepts his plastic-wrapped clothing with flat thanks, then exits the shop. The scene concludes without comment from a clearly bemused Takabe. In a sense, this is the crux of Cure: the idea that, in this paint-peeled Tokyo, everybody harbours bubbling resentments that they cannot express. The city crammed with unfailing polite people who are neither seen nor catered to and, precisely because of that, this engenders in them a terrible but untapped anger. Which brings us to Masato Hagiwara's Mamiya. Seemingly an amnesic vagrant and, therefore, someone so vulnerable that they have slipped out of any implied social order. When conversations with Mamiya end he cannot recall the beginning of these queries; he responds to every question directed at him with increasingly incisive prods of his own. Despite his dishevelled and disorientated demeanour, Mamiya proves himself a powerful broadcaster, apparently able to either intuit the deeply personal prejudices of who he is addressing or, perhaps, even able to craft them for a receptive person out of thin air. 

Linked to a series of murders in which unconnected persons have each carved x-shaped gashes into their victim's throats, Mamiya, in his every action, represents a disquieting break from the hierarchical norms that underline society. Formerly a psychology student, Mamiya faded away from school as his obsession with mesmerism grew; amassing a library on the subject and even fashioning fetishes out of caged animals. To converse with Mamiya, to even attempt to dissect his motives - the crux of all police procedural - proves to be alarmingly dangerous. The resilient Takabe, seemingly used to discursive conversation and droning, domestic undertones thanks to a mentally unwell wife, doesn't react to Mamiya in quite the same way as everybody else though. He is, at least up to a point, able to resist the suggestions that this Svengali is attempting to plant. To strike back at Mamiya's interrogations, not just verbally but physically, when others would slip under his somnambulic spell. As Kurosawa's film presses on, and Mamiya's power within the piece grows, significant sequences are given over to hallucination and paranoid fantasy, blurring the line between waking life and manufactured dreams. Through clipped scene assembly and ominous, overbearing noise we are made to understand what it is to experience intrusive thoughts and even a kind of growing, murderous psychosis. A sense of menace prevails in Cure, transforming every dangling sentence - every ellipsis recorded on the subtitle track - into an implied, imminent threat. By now Kurosawa has trained us to expect catastrophe. 

Doppelgänger

Ostensibly a comedy, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (co-writing with Takeshi Furusawa)'s Doppelgänger is, true to form, threaded with moments of skin-prickling, domestic horror. Premised on the sudden (not to mention inexplicable) appearance of several unusually determined dead ringers, who behave as if they powered solely by the feelings and desires that repressed people regularly choke down, Kurosawa's film largely concerns itself with Michio Hayasaki, a floundering robotics engineer, played by Koji Hashimoto. Middle-aged, single and socially timid, Hayasaki suffers beneath the kind of corporate deadlines that the clapped-out mechanical wheelchair he's obsessed with cannot possibly hope to meet. Quite unable to complete this extremely ambitious project, Hayasaki does eventually welcome the spitting image that lingers around his apartment into the fold, operating under the assumption that his productivity will now, effectively, be doubled. As it turns out, this mirror Hayasaki isn't particularly scrupulous or overly concerned with interpersonal niceties, preferring to live his strange little half-life in enormous, violent sweeps. The battle of wills between these two, clashing aspects steers Doppelgänger further and further into an amusing absurdity, one in which the film's otherwise firm sense of reality begins to buckle and break down the closer its characters limp to their finish.

The Return of Godzilla

Japan has completely changed in the nine years that Godzilla has spent dormant. The sprawling concrete space of late 1960s Tokyo is gone, replaced by a vertical growth of glass and steel. A new civic prison has sprung up to trap and frustrate the migrating behemoth. The Return of Godzilla is a reset button, of sorts, for the series, explicitly taking the titular monster back to his radioactive roots. Broadly, this is a remake of the 1954 film with Godzilla cast as a drifting natural disaster.

Not only is Return a continuity restart designed to unravel all those pesky defender of humanity strands, but the actual characteristics of Godzilla are defaulted too. Where later entries made the King of Monsters an elemental deity plucked from polytheistic pantheon, Return reintroduces the idea that Godzilla is a mutant who draws its strength directly from nuclear power. This monster cascades over the landscape, stalking Japanese power plants like a babysitter slasher. Godzilla has awoken from his slumber with a healthy appetite. After a Russian nuclear submarine is chewed-up, the world's superpowers are quickly at the Japanese PM's throat, demanding that they be allowed to bomb this creature, and Japan, out of existence. Naturally, the domestic solution is much more elegant, built on scientific ingenuity and maybe even empathy with this rampaging daikaiju.

Koji Hashimoto's sole Godzilla entry is pitched somewhere between Jaws and Threads, a square-framed apocalypse that is happy to discuss both the micro and macro fallout of a fission-powered God. As well as the usual budding romance between a couple of largely forgettable humans, a significant amount of time is spent with politicians attempting to make sense out of the situation. Initially Godzilla's re-emergence earns a D-Notice, the bureaucrats afraid that the news might spook the stock market and pop Japan's economic bubble. Time is also taken to talk about Nihon's place in the nuclear hierarchy. With Russia and America desperate to fire satellite missiles at their major cities, not to mention a history of actually having been atomically bombed themselves, the Japanese cabinet concludes that their country is seen as no more than a testing ground for the experimental weaponry of their superpowered neighbours. It's an off-hand remark, but speaks to a wider, global, perspective on the culture of fear that ensnared two former allies following the Second World War.

Unfortunately, Return marks the final series credit for the fantastically talented Teruyoshi Nakano. Graduating to a full special effects director credit with 1971's Godzilla vs Hedorah, Nakano injected the then-ailing franchise with a sense of genuine horror. After Sadamasa Arikawa squandered Eiji Tsuburaya's genre defining creations, Nakano came to the rescue with scenes and monsters that stressed genuine cataclysm. His special effects action was trapped in a gloomy world clogged with thick, oozing smoke. Fights between Nakano's juggernauts were likewise tinged with pain and even desperation. Return is no exception. As Godzilla stomps through a scratch built Tokyo, the wreckage piles up until the landscape begins to resembles news footage of an actual catastrophe. If buildings are not burnt down to their steel bones, they sag wearily, burping out plumes of soot. People, particularly military personnel, suffer and die as Godzilla stumbles around searching for his next fissile feast.

Despite Nakano firing on all cylinders, Return fluffs it in a few other areas. Yasuko Sawaguchi isn't given a great deal to do other than look cute as the film's passive heroine Naoko. This reductionism particularly strange in a series that has always insisted on making female characters key components in the various collectives. The appearance of a trillion yen flying saucer is also a peculiar development, from a conceptual rather than practical effect perspective. The craft's impossibly fantastical design is a strange choice in a film largely positioned as a 1980s update of a documentary-style nuclear parable. Still, the Super X aircraft has some nice detailing to it - in order to cope with an enemy that operates as a living, breathing atomic reactor, the Super X is armed with cadmium bullets that are able to galvanise neutron decay within Godzilla, slowing the king kaiju's advance.

Return of Godzilla's problems then mostly arise from an internal tension regarding its relationship to the wider series. Is the film a sequel or a reboot? The more outlandish elements, typical to the kaiju films of the late 60s and early 70s, sit awkwardly alongside the incredible ordinariness of scenes that depict the National Diet pontificating their place in the world. Return is very much like the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan eras of the James Bond franchise in that sense. Both Return and those 007 films attempt to take their material much more seriously but are hamstrung in their efforts by an inability to fully disconnect from their sillier recent past. There is a sense of uniqueness in Hashimoto's film though, even when viewed in light of the Godzilla sequels that would soon follow. When the monster is eventually beaten, his defeat is marked not with celebration but with a silent, teary, respect. Despite the horrors he has visited on them, the Japanese cabinet cannot find it in themselves to fully hate Godzilla. The passing of this gigantic, nearly invincible creature actually inspires a kind of mourning. This slight tweak of expectation is typical of Hashimoto's film. A scene threatening to descend into hoary Hollywood cliché is given new life simply by being from a different national perspective.