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 have disagreed with his way of approaching work. He then changes tact, directing his hisses at an absent clerk who has, maybe, lingered a little too long picking out the man's laundered clothing. The salaryman snarls 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 simmering resentments that cannot be openly expressed. The city is crammed with unfailing polite people that are neither seen nor catered to and, precisely because of this, a terrible but untapped anger is engendered. 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 but, while these chats are in progress, he responds to every question directed at him with increasingly incisive prods back. Despite his dishevelled and disorientated demeanour, Mamiya proves himself to be a powerful broadcaster, apparently able to either intuit the deeply personal prejudices of the person he is addressing or, perhaps, even able to craft slights out of thin air then deposit them into receptive vessels. 

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. Away from academia he amassed a library on the subject and even fashioned fetishes out of caged animals, all in an attempt to arrive at some somnambulic absolute. To converse with Mamiya, to even attempt to dissect his motives - the crux of all police procedural - proves to be alarmingly dangerous then. 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 find themselves slipping under his spell. As Kurosawa's film presses further 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 dreams that have been manufactured. 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. Kurosawa has trained us to expect catastrophe.