Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A frustrated detective deals with the case of several gruesome murders committed by people who have no recollection of what they've done.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure is a landmark of psychological horror and neo-noir, built around a deeply unsettling and original central conceit — a drifting amnesiac who appears to hypnotically unlock latent violence in strangers, leaving X-shaped wounds and no memory. The plot is genuinely exceptional: methodical, intellectually rigorous, and suffused with existential dread about identity and modernity in Japan. Cinematography is well above average — Kurosawa and DP Tokushô Kikumura employ long static takes, oppressive negative space, and deliberately muted industrial interiors to create a suffocating atmosphere unlike virtually any horror film of its era. Novelty is very high; the film is singular in its conception, blending police procedural coldness with cosmic-horror unease in a way that influenced a generation of J-horror but was never quite replicated. Acting is solid — Kôji Yakusho anchors it with a quietly fraying performance — but supporting work is functional rather than exceptional. The ending is genuinely haunting and thematically coherent but divisive in its ambiguity; it resolves the metaphysical logic of the film while deliberately refusing narrative closure, which works but doesn't fully transcend.