While he doesn’t quite get his due these days, Martin Scorsese once called Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira Kurosawa) “a major filmmaker…an absolute master of light, framing, and pacing.” That’s pretty damn high praise, and it’s absolutely true. Kurosawa’s career has somewhat waned in recent years, but in the early 2000s, he was known to be one of the forerunners of the Japanese New Wave Horror movement. Kurosawa made superb horror films like “Pulse” (2001), “Bright Future” (2003), “Doppelganger” (2003), “Charisma” (1999), and many more. But his films were never traditional horror, much more eerie, creepy, psychologically disturbing, spooky, and spectral with many notions of existential dread. In 2007 he made one of his masterworks, 1997’s “Cure,” something more of a crime/detective procedural. Fans of Bong Joon-Ho’s “Memories Of Murder,” which was recently rightfully reestablished as a classic piece of crime cinema, should probably appreciate this film too, a movie that is grisly and full of disturbing tension. The film also stars the great Koji Yakusho, who starred in so many of Kurosawa’s best works.
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Since 1983, Kurosawa has made nearly 25 films, and if his career has diminished in recent years, it might be because no one knows what box to put him in anymore: he’s essentially evolved far beyond just horror and tried every genre under the sun, including his most recent film, the Hitchcockian espionage thriller, “Wife of a Spy.” Either way, Kurosawa is absolutely ripe for a reevaluation from cinephiles, so this “Cure” 4K restoration and re-release will hopefully be the beginning of this moment. Here’s the movie’s official synopsis:
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Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s spellbinding international breakthrough established him as one of the leaders of the emerging new wave of Japanese horror while pushing the genre into uncharted realms of philosophical and existential exploration. A string of shocking, seemingly unmotivated murders—each committed by a different person yet bearing the same grisly hallmarks—leads Detective Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho) into a labyrinthine investigation to discover what connects them, and into a disturbing game of cat and mouse with an enigmatic amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara) who may be evil incarnate. Awash in a mood of hushed, hypnotic dread, Cure is a tour de force of psychological tension and a hallucinatory journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind.
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“Cure” opens October 1 via Janus Films in select theaters. You’ll notice the Criterion logo in the top right corner of the trailer, which speaks to the relationships between these two companies. In short, this was is Criterion-approved and should be part of the Collection soon if you’re looking for a greater selling point (guys, please do a big box set here). Regardless, check out the new 4K restoration below.