A series of brutal killings rock Tokyo - victims are always found with two cuts carved into their sternum, forming a distinctive X shape. The weird thing: the killers are always caught shortly afterwards, not even trying to hide their crime. Normal people who admit to just... snapping, and killing someone.
Detective Kenichi Takebe (Kōji Yakusho) and his colleague Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), a police psychologist, are at loss, as there doesn't seem to be anything linking the crimes or the criminals; the details of the killings have been kept firmly under wraps as well, ruling out some sort of copycat situation.
At the same time, we start following an amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara), who drifts from place to place, and eventually is shown to be at ground zero for most of the killings. Once the police figure this out and start investigating him, they find links to Mesmer and animal magnetism, and studies on hypnotism dating back to the nineteenth century.
Though the film predates the Ringu by a full year, it's easy to see how it shares many preoccupations with J-horror. Not to mention writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa would go on to make Pulse (Kairo), my favorite entry into that particular genre.
Not that it's exactly a horror movie, though I wouldn't object to it being lumped in the genre. It patiently follows its threads from situation to situation, drifting effortlessly from murder to investigation to some of the character's personal lives to another murder and on and on. What sense of urgency there is comes from the detective's deteriorating frame of mind, but the seeming inevitability of a preordained resolution renders his struggle pointless. Things will end as they must.
It's enigmatic to a fault, but there is an explanation, however loose it may be, to the mysteries it presents. And the central mystery itself is never less than compelling, with no shortage of disturbing imagery - from desiccated monkeys to someone listlessly peeling back a flap of skin over a dead man's face. There's also a few incredibly creepy sequences where the film stock changes as the amnesiac casts his spell over others.
Cinematographer Tokushô Kikumura is in perfect sync with the director, and his alternatingly static and flowing camerawork adds a lot to the film's (apologies) hypnotic allure.
Kurosawa had been toiling for twenty years by the time Cure put him on the map internationally (the only movie of his I've seen previous to this one is Sweet Home, an excellent, very energetic Poltergeist-style haunted house yarn).
Like many other Japanese directors, the guy is insanely prolific: he directed three other movies the year it came out. It's crazy a movie this controlled, that demands so much patience, was only one fourth of his output that year.
I find it hard to write about a movie that's had so much figurative ink spent trying to wrangle meaning out of it. I've seen it a few times over the years, and while I personally don't find it as rewarding as, say, Kairo, it's still a deeply peculiar movie- unique, haunting and enthralling.
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