Daiei Co. Ltd. [1997] 111′
country: Japan
director: KIYOSHI KUROSAWA
cast: KOJI YAKUSHO, MASATO HAGIWARA,
cast: TSUYOSHI UJIKU, ANNA NAKAGAWA
A middle aged businessman removes a length of lead piping from a tunnel. Later that day he meets with a prostitute in an average motel room and, without warning, clubs her to death with the piping. So begins the inimitable film experience that is CURE.
One who desires to be on the cutting edge of cinema need not look further than the Japanese indie film movement over the past 10 years or so – directors like Hideo Nakata, Takashi Miike, and Takashi Shimizu have brought the Japanese horror genre – now affectionately referred to as J-Horror – an entirely new sense of respect throughout the world. With CURE, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has taken the genre that these men helped to popularize and utterly revolutionized it – his revolution would reach near perfection by the time of his apocalyptic film KAIRO [2001].
Though Kurosawa’s film output had been quite prolific in the fourteen years leading up to CURE – he averaged three films a year – the international film community had taken little notice of him. Involved primarily with low budget softcore porn and other films that were meant to earn the majority of their revenue on video release, much of Kurosawa’s work from 1983 through 1996 went (and still goes) generally unnoticed. Hints of the greatness he would achieve later in his career are peppered throughout his earlier films, however – often quite liberally.
