Cure

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

1997 / 111min / 4K DCP

Kurosawa’s international breakthrough rode a tide of late ’90s J-horror mania, but was immediately recognizable as the work of a formidable formalist whose thematic and philosophical concerns went deeper than jump scares. Detective Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho), faced with explaining how a series of eerily similar murders could have been committed by different, unconnected, unmotivated culprits, follows a twisted trail that leads him to Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), an amnesiac who may hold the key to the mystery. Suffused with a sense of smothering dread, possessed of a hypnotic grip and gorgeously grim sound design, no less a personage than Martin Scorsese can tell you that Cure “will haunt you for a long time to come.”

Part of In Pursuit of Shadows