The 1997 film “Cure” by Kiyoshi Kurosawa follows Tokyo detective Takabe as he investigates a string of murders that despite their perpetrators being different, are connected by their MO, an X being carved into the neck of the victims, an exciting plot to be sure, but this kind of story is reserved for police procedurals, such as David Fincher’s “Se7en”, released two years prior, or “Memories of Murder”. So why is it considered a horror movie?
I believe Cure falls into the subgenre that I like to call daylight horror, which consists of films that manage to shock and frighten while not hiding under the guise and blanket that can be darkness. These daylight horror films, such as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, or most recently, “Midsommar” portray their events as so inevitable that the fact that they are in broad daylight, which in many cases, at least in film, is considered to be safer than darkness don’t matter to the plot of the film, as seen in Cure.
Without spoiling anything in the film, Cure’s horror is more atmospheric than thrilling. There aren’t many scenes that contain any real “action”, quite the opposite, as Kiyoshi Kurosawa attempts to maximize immersion by making the audience stay in one place throughout every scene. We watch the characters in this film become perverted by others, we watch the main detective, Takabe, become infatuated with this case and we are powerless to stop it, and that’s how this film achieves its thrills.
There is a scene in Cure, where we watch a policeman shoot another in the head, outside, in broad daylight. Coupled with the lack of score, depending on background noises of a quiet street in Japan, this scene is shocking, and in the context of what seemed like a calm scene, unexpected. Kurosawa lingers on the shot enough to make you uncomfortable, as you begin to realize what occurred, and it changes all character dynamics. This is not the only scene where the director does this however, as the films lack of general musical score, or jump-scares, make you nervous for what might happen, or what might not, and that is where the magic is.
The lingering shots. The silence of moments in the life of these characters. These are tools that are used to portray the powerlessness that we have over our own mind and psyche, and as it mixes in surrealism with the mundane, we begin to understand the mental state of these characters. “Cure” manages to normalize the psychological horror involved in daily life, and we start to fear that this, no matter how far fetched the situation is (normal, well situated people committing acts of gruesome murder) could happen to us, the audience, and we might be too weak to stop it.
For this, “Cure” is deeply unsettling. A police procedural, that similar to its grittier genre-companions (which I mentioned at the beginning), involves a well written cop plot, yet focuses more on the horrors of these crimes, and proves that maybe what makes a murder horrible isn’t always the violence, more the malice behind it.
Horror is defined as “a piece of fiction of variable length… which shocks, or even frightens the watcher, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing”, according to historian J.A. Cuddon, and I feel that despite breaking all arbitrary rules of what is usually defined as a horror film, especially after the rise and fall of slasher films in the horror genre, Cure fits the definition perfectly.
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