In Kiyoshi Kursosawa’s ‘Cure’, Stress Relief Means Murder
Joshua Meyer
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For the longest time, Kiyoshi Kurosawaâs Cureâone of the great unsung J-horror films never to be remadeâwas unavailable on home media in the U.S. The plot involves a stoic cop, Takabe (Koji Yakusho), investigating a string of murders that all bear the same M.O., despite being committed by different people with no criminal history and no connection to one another. These are average citizens whose jobs peg them as pillars of society, like teachers, doctors, and even other cops. Something has made each person snap and transgress the bounds of polite Japanese society in the bloodiest way imaginable. It would seem homicide by hypnosis is at play, in both the story and its mesmerizing power to slay the viewerâs lizard brain.
In the 2020s, other prominent Asian filmmakers have championed Cure, including three-time Oscar winner Bong Joon-hoo (Parasite), who nominated it as one of the greatest films of all time in Sight and Sound magazineâs once-a-decade poll. It wasnât until October 2022, however, that Cure finally escaped streaming limbo when Criterion unveiled a 4K restoration of it for its 25th anniversary. In his Dread Central review, Chad Collins called the movie a âterrifying J-horror masterpiece.â If you bought the Blu-ray, youâd see two-time Oscar nominee Ryusuke Yamaguchi (Drive My Car), a former student of Kurosawaâs at Tokyo University of the Arts, interviewing the director and professing his love for Cure.
Some among us were still left thinking, âWho do I have to hypnotize to get a digital release?â Late last year, Cure finally arrived in rentable form on platforms like iTunes, so now itâs out there for the widest possible audience to see. Kurosawa has said that the concept of aimai-sa, or ambiguity, was an important one for this film. It manifests itself onscreen as the good, intriguing kind of ambiguity, not the lazy kind. You can watch Cure once and understand it intuitively before the inevitable rewatch leaves you speculating about the meaning of certain things, including the clues to an older mythology that play out on its edges. One question underpins its thematic weight: why exactly is it called Cure?
All the worldâs a mental hospital
Cure opens with Takabeâs wife, Fumie (Anna Nakagawa), meeting her doctor in a mental hospital. Her unspecified condition has her doing things like running the washing machine with no clothes in it and getting lost in her neighborhood on the way to the convenience store. This sets the stage for a story where Takabe and the people in his orbit, even a stranger muttering under his breath at the dry cleaners, are struggling to maintain their sanity in a disorienting world.
Fumie reads aloud from the tale of Bluebeard, the wife-burying version of a Black Widow killer. The later scene with the empty washing machine, spinning like a frantic automaton with nothing under its lid, provides a glimpse into Takabeâs private struggle to care for Fumie at home while confronting constant inhumanity in crime scenes at work. Itâs sandwiched between scenes of the ill-fated teacher bringing home an amnesiac man, and the teacher jumping out the window after butchering his wife.
This juxtaposition of subplots foreshadows Takabeâs character arc as a turn-of-the-millennium Bluebeard. In Cure, Yakushoâs depressed salaryman character from Shall We Dance? (released a year prior to great success) would become a stressed-out cop with a much unhealthier outlet for his modern anxieties. His new dance partner for this movie would be Masato Hagiwara (Chaos), who gives a chilling turn as Mamiya, a man who appears to suffer from complete amnesia of both the retrograde and anterograde type.
When Mamiya first appears, itâs on a beach in Chiba Prefecture. At first, the beach is empty. Then, Cure cuts to Mamiyaâs victim, the teacher, looking out across the beach. Then, it cuts back to the previous beach shot, but weâre in the teacherâs perspective this time, and he sees Mamiya there. Gazing up at the sky like The Man Who Fell to Earth, the character shows up out of nowhere, almost as if heâs an incarnation of the teacherâs consciousness. Later, we see Takabeâs face positioned behind Mamiyaâs head, and vice versa, so that it looks like theyâre tumors growing out of each otherâs brains.
In the meantime, as Takabe begins to suspect that the killers heâs investigating might have all been hypnotized, parallel scenes with Mamiya reveal more of his methods. âXâ marks the spot where the people heâs mesmerized with fire and water have sliced the flesh of their loved ones or other victims. His power over them, if not supernatural, is visibly elemental. All he needs is a relaxing voice, the flicker of a lighter here, and the spread of a spilled glass there, to lull someone into a suggestive state. Pretty soon, theyâre moving around like mindless pawns. Cue the whirling-dervish home appliance.
Hypnotherapy of the id
Since he has few memories from one minute to the next, Mamiya is a slippery interrogation subject. Itâs hinted his amnesia may be selective since he remembers a certain woman in a pink negligee, and he remembers that Takabe is âa detective with a crazy wife.â When an inconsistency in his pattern of amnesia emerges, he explains to the teacher, âI donât remember anything. You do.â
Thatâs just what a walking id would say before he wormed his way back into your head, isnât it? Mamiya moves freely from the corridors of one personâs skull to the next, exploiting the koban copâs resentment for his by-the-book partner next. A strange calm passes over the cop before he shoots his partner in the back of the head like itâs just another mundane task to be performed after taking out the trash. âHe was someone I didnât like,â the cop confesses to Takabe. âI put up with him all the time. Finally, I couldnât stand it anymore. [âŚ] Thatâs how you get when you hate someone from the bottom of your heart.â
Like the teacher with his wife, the cop is a foil for Takabe, who may or may not dispatch his forensic psychologist friend, Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), by the end of the movie. When youâre alert to the microaggressions of each scene, you can also see how Mamiyaâs next victim, the doctor, internalizes the sexism she deals with on a daily basis. Notice the way she gives a brief, pensive look out the window when she sits down to write after she tells her patient to take his pants down and he says, âYouâre not shy, are you?â
Mamiya needles the doctor about how she wanted to be a surgeon but settled for being a general practitioner in a manâs world. Cut to her peeling a manâs face off on the floor of a public restroom. Before that, as Mamiya uses tap water to aid his hypnosis of her, he tells her, âAll the things that used to be inside me, now theyâre all outside.â He also says, âThe inside of me is empty.â Karappo. The liberating thought of, âWhy hold it in?â gives way to a sociopath, devoid of memories or feeling, shuffling down the hall in his hospital slippers, ready to treat another patient.
Takabe vs. Mamiya for the fate of the world
As Cure takes on more mysterious, occult shadings, thereâs ample talk of âMesmer,â the original German mesmerist, whose theory of animal magnetism might have something to do with that sacrificial monkey Takabe finds twisted all out of shape in a grimy bathtub. This is right around the time that Kurosawaâs film gets funky with the editing, employing quick cuts that throw the audience off since itâs already settled into the slow-burn trance of long takes and a pervasive quietude. The effect of sharing a POV characterâs psychological break at a pivotal narrative moment is especially unsettling when youâve got the lights turned down and are fully absorbed in the mood of Cure. If tone poems could kill (without being boring), this would be one.
In Takabe, Mamiya may have finally met his match, someone who can take over from him as the carrier of the titular âcureâ in the 21st century. At one point, they get into a hypnotic staring contest, as Takabe uses Mamiyaâs own lighter against him, fighting fire with fire while the room darkens. Even after the ceiling leaks rainwater and Mamiya equates emptiness with happiness in dulcet tones, Takabe is able to resist his soothing voice. Or is he?
âWe should all relax, enjoy ourselves, lead peaceful lives, but society isnât like that,â Takabe laments. âLunatics like you have it easy while citizens like me go through hell.â In the process of telling Mamiya (and himself) this, Takabe leaves himself open to Mamiyaâs malign influence, doing the bad guyâs work for him in their increasingly shared mindscape. If the way of the sane individual is such hell, the temptation for Takabe is to abandon his duties and give himself over to a stress-free life, where Fumie is dead and the good in him is gone, but so is the guilt. Observing how he keeps his personal and professional lives compartmentalized, Mamiya asks him, âThe detective or the husband, which is the real you? Neither one is the real you. There is no real you. Your wife knows that, too.â
These lines are interspersed with Takabe telling Mamiya to shut up and attempting to interject questions, which Mamiya ignores since heâs too busy interrogating his interrogatorâs very sense of self. Itâs a trick he pulls with one of Takabeâs superiors at police headquarters, too, asking him, âWho are you? Do you understand my question?â
Ultimately, Takabe releases all his pent-up aggression and admits, âMy wife is a burden.â Heâs been taught to show no emotion, whereas Mamiya wants him to uncork the bottle and pour his emotion out all over the world.
Missionary of evil
The original working title of Cure in Japanese was Dendoshi, meaning âMissionaryâ or âEvangelist.â At the 2018 Tokyo International Film Festival, Kurosawa indicated that it was changed at the behest of the production company, Daiei Film, to avoid any religious connotation. The Tokyo subway sarin attack, perpetrated by the real-world doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, in 1995, was still recent in memory. For a mostly nonreligious country (over 70% in one recent survey, via the Associated Press), a cultish-sounding horror film might have served as an unwelcome reminder.
Daiei Film is now called Kadokawa Daiei Studio, and itâs within walking distance of my local movie theater in Chofu, Tokyo. In the train station and on the side of the studio building, you can see murals of Gamera, the Giant Monster. The monster in Cure lacks Gameraâs kaiju turtle tusks, but when he comes out of his shell, heâs no less a threat to human civilization. This goes back to something Yakusho said at the film festival about how Cure is âa movie about a human monster with no stress.â
You can still see traces of the Dendoshi angle in Cure, though that label doesnât necessarily apply to Takabe himself until the end. Mamiya is the one who lays his hand on the doctorâs head like a prophet of doom, baptizing a new apostle. In a hypnotic trance, Sakuma, whose name rhymes with akuma (âdevilâ), describes Mamiya as, âA missionary. Sent to propagate the ceremony.â He speaks further of hypnotism, and how it was once thought of as âsoul conjuringâ in Japan, as if hypnotists themselves were mediums channeling spirits.
In Western religious terms, you could say that Mamiya is like John the Baptist if his mission was to awaken the latent evil in a sleeper demon who would become the Antichrist. In this way, he converts Takabe to the church of evil. Early on, Sakuma argues, âEven if you manage to hypnotize someone, you canât change their basic moral sense. A person who thinks murder is evil wonât kill anyone under hypnotic suggestion.â This presupposes that people arenât capable of having a dual nature where one side of them desires, consciously or unconsciously, to do what the other side of them considers wrong.
At the festival, speaking in Japanese, Kurosawa pinpointed Yakushoâs inscrutable quality as an actorâhis ability to toggle between good and evil, even in a single sceneâas the exact essence of Takabe, the protagonist who guides the audience into michi no ryĹiki (unknown territory) in Cure. He and Yakusho used the word, michi, a lot, and itâs one that also pops up famously in Michi tono sĂ´gĂť, or âEncounters with the Unknown,â the Japanese title of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Takabe finds himself in a liminal space like that, encountering the unknown, crossing over into Mamiyaâs territory, at the end of Cure. When he takes a bus through the clouds and meets Mamiya in an abandoned warehouse of the mind, the missionary makes his thoughts on morality and basic human indecency clear, telling Takabe, âAnyone who wants to meet his true self is bound to come here.â
Horror without borders
In Cure, whatâs true for Mamiya is unconscious impulses. Inducing murder by mesmerism, he provides a pill for stress relief that comes at the cost of oneâs humanity. Itâs a momentary relief that, for most victims, leads to permanent anguish. Takabe is the one who breaks the mold in the cold living nightmare that is this movie. Heâs the one who shows no remorse and, in fact, has a healthy appetite once the ceremony of evil is propagated. The detective, husband, and law-abiding citizen now embraces his sociopathic side, which was maybe always there, lingering under the surface, enabling him to think like the killers heâd occasionally catch hiding naked in the walls. The murder alphabet, which was up to âXâ by Mamiyaâs time, ends with Takabe and âZ,â which he traces on a dewy car window, and which is slashed through the movie screen as the closing credits roll.
The bloodshot eyes of this American expat first discovered Cure circa October 2015 when it screened as part of an overnight, four-movie marathon called âMasters of J-Horrorâ at the Tokyo International Film Festival. Back then, I would have told you the title was a nod to peopleâs id being unleashed as a cure for repression in Japanese culture. That may still be true on one level, but now, my earlier perspective seems limited, while Cure seems bigger and scarier, as if itâs Horror Without Borders.
The filmâs relevance begins in the specific milieu where it was made, but you canât reduce it to one culture or cathedral of art because the themes are universal. If thereâs one thing crime and politics stateside have shown since 2016, itâs that some forms of repression or simple restraint definitely are preferable, like not sending that hate tweet, not joining that tiki-torch-wielding street mob, not committing that random act of violence against an Asian-American. These read like symptoms of some uncured malady in a world with a fever thatâs yet to break, a fever that may be getting actively worse. Mental illness is one thing; lacking self-control or even self-awareness, like the id-programmed killers in Cure, is another.
In 2024, the first three days of Japanâs biggest family holiday, New Yearâs, were marked by an inauspicious series of disasters: a major earthquake, an airport runway collision, a burning restaurant district, and a train-stabbing incident. Cure feels plucked from the tension of headlines like those, though itâs as if Mamiyaâs metaphorical sickness has now spread from humanity and its petty violence to the environment and planetary catastrophes.
With wars and rumors of wars in the news globally every day, and a dreaded U.S. election rematch coming in November, the Year of the Dragon already feels positively preapocalyptic in a mid-to-late â90s sort of way. Tokyo wasnât the only place with a doomsday cult taking lives before Y2K, either. When Cure was released in 1997, it was only nine months removed from the mass suicide committed by 39 members of the Heavenâs Gate cult, who hoped to catch a ride on the Hale-Bopp comet from their ranch in the San Diego suburbs.
The true horror in Cure is that of the new insanity, which is really the old insanity, cycling back around to destroy another community or civilization. Itâs the horror of society breaking down, with hypnotized civilians casting off polite pretense and social conscience to act on their worst impulses. If the only cure for stress is to numb yourself to empathy, what hope do any of us have?
Categorized:Editorials
