Kurosawa’s ‘Creepy’ Chills as Much Today as It Did a Decade Ago
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s aptly titled investigation into the performance and subversion of social expectations, Creepy, is approaching its 10th anniversary since its US premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival. The setup of a traumatized retired detective moving into a new neighborhood with a shifty neighbor feels, based on narrative conventions, like one that would escalate quickly and intensely. Instead, as is common with Kurosawa, it is a bizarre, slow, and methodically paced descent into investigating community, obfuscation, and social structure.
Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) retires from his detective work, specializing in psychopaths, after an attempt to save someone’s life from a psychopathic criminal fails, and he is wounded in the process. He and his wife move to a new city, and Koichi takes a job teaching criminal psychology in an attempt to move on from this traumatizing event. They meet their next-door neighbor, Masayuki Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa), who quickly gives them both a bad feeling. The Takakuras’ attempts at kindness and neighborly warmth start to move toward suspicion and nervousness due to Masayuki’s bug-eyed, stilted, and borderline inappropriate behavior and demeanor. As they investigate Masayuki and his daughter, trying to learn more about him, a parallel plotline sees Koichi pulled into exploring a family’s unsolved disappearance from six years earlier by his old colleague, Nogami (Masahiro Higashide). They eventually meet up with Honda (Haruna Kawaguchi), the only remaining member of the family.
Creepy is driven by the fear of what could be possible with the combination of social alienation and polite social expectations, creating an environment easily abused by a psychopath, or really, anyone with nefarious intentions. Kurosawa is pointing toward the theatrics of kindness and sociability, and how some may use those to their benefit. Throughout the film, we see Masayuki barely capable of maintaining an air of normalcy, while the Takakuras exist with a willingness toward connectivity and openness. This is perfectly exemplified in the first instance, where we see them in their new home. The natural lighting seeps through, and the environment feels clean. Yasuko (Yūko Takeuchi), Koichi’s wife, initiates a set of introductions to their new neighbors. They are immediately contrasted with one neighbor who is clearly unhappy they showed up at her door, and their next-door neighbor, Masayuki, does not even answer his doorbell.
Kurosawa’s contrasting uses of interior design to highlight the separation between sociability and openness are excellent. The way the curtains flowed felt as symbolic as it did incidental. As mentioned, the Takakuras’ demeanor of openness and social goodwill extends beyond words and gestures. Their house is welcoming, again with drawn curtains and natural lighting. Masayuki, before even being shown on screen, draws a clear aesthetic parallel, with the house being protected by a locked gate and camera, and right next to this gate is an area covered by a dirty tarp-like curtain that, to me, feels instantly reminiscent of a body bag.
In a scene later in the film, Masuyuki, his daughter, and the Takakuras have dinner together at their home. In the dining room, the curtains are closed, but lightly colored and cleaned. In this room, the veil of politeness is sternly upheld in conversation. When Masayuki and Koichi exit this room, to one that’s not only darker but also missing any kind of curtain in frame, their conversation begins to feel more overtly antagonistic.
The way curtains flow carries two meanings: It is used both as a physical veil, flowing in motion with the active community spaces, hiding things, and providing cover for rotten hallways and dilapidated souls. It is also a reminder of social fabrication. Curtains can cover up, of course, but they are also mobile and require a willingness from a human participant to operate by design. Social fabric, or at the very least, the willingness to uphold this theater, is a double-edged curtain. One that requires mutual goodwill to function ideally, but can be easily abused.
One of the recurring locations of this movie, the school Koichi teaches at, has no curtains whatsoever, but blinds that are easily seen through. Here, the pretext of politeness over confrontation and truth is essentially abandoned. His teaching constantly covers stark and explicit crimes, and Koichi and Nogami vigorously investigate the cold case here, questioning Honda in order to receive as much clarity as possible on her experience and memories.
The contrasting interior aesthetics are further hammered home once we fully enter Masayuki’s home; not only is his living space defined by a lack of light, but black curtains also furnish the windows. We get nothing beyond grim, concrete, brutalist design in his dungeon; something miserable, without light, without levity.
Much of this movie plays as a quiet mystery–there is clearly something off about Masayuki, but, because of Koichi’s willingness to try to uphold community and social structure, juxtaposed with his expertise investigating psychopaths who cannot/will not uphold such things, he is both suspicious and hopeful that his worst inclinations about what Masayuki might be aren’t true.
Kurosawa is fascinated by the grip that make-believe and performance have on a functioning social infrastructure. In his desperation to maintain a zeitgeist of politeness and community-based mutual privacy, Koichi is taken advantage of. In fact, a lack of community tightness is an explicit reason Honda’s family’s mystery had not been solved–they weren’t friendly with their neighbors, so Honda couldn’t remember exactly who lived next to them, who most likely was the perpetrator of her family’s disappearance. I’d argue that, in the end, Kurosawa is pessimistic here, questioning whether knowing your neighbor and maintaining social norms are still methods to protect yourself from nefarious people.
Creepy is an off-beat, quiet unraveling, driven home by bizarre, excellent performances and direction. I first saw this movie a couple of years ago, and there was something purely disorienting and confusing about it. Curtains create distance and obfuscation; hallways become corridors leading to death; shaking hands become a method of possession–without goodwill, these things become pathways towards control. In Creepy, the things that uphold social norms also subvert them.
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