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; he responds to every question directed at him with incrasingly incisive inquiries 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 who faded away from school as his obsession with mesmerism grew, to converse with Mamiya, to even attempt to dissect his motives - the crux of all police procedural - proves to be alarmingly dangerous. Takabe, seemingly used to discursive conversation and droning, domestic undertones thanks to his 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 amoral hypnotist is attempting to plant. To strike back, physically, when others 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 the language of Cure 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 this film, 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.
