Film Notes: Cure

In the desolate, abandoned corners of Tokyo, Japan, a killer lurks through the streets convincing seemingly ordinary people to commit gruesome murders and awaken with no clear explanation for their actions. A dogged detective with problems at home commits to finding and catching this killer—not just to bring him to justice, but to understand the how and the why that these murderers were committed.

It's a familiar story in the crime thriller genre, but what sets Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure apart from its prior inspirations and the many imitators that came after is the film's uncanny focus. There is a rot in the city, apparent in every frame, every abandoned building scheduled for demolition. In the mid-'90s, Japan was deep in a financial crisis which had followed a bubble economy so sudden and seemingly infinite that when the bubble popped, the crash was more dire than anyone could have imagined. The financial crisis was so bad, in fact, that the wave of young college graduates and employable youths in the '90s are referred to as the Lost Generation of Japan. Shortly before Cure's release, in 1995, a cult known as Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas on the Tokyo Metro, killing over a dozen people and injuring hundreds more. There was a newly revealed darkness in the country for many citizens—an understanding that those in power did not have the answers and that safety and material comfort was not, and never could be, a guarantee.

In Cure, Kurosawa finds an outlet for that national miasma as ordinary people find themselves both the victim and the perpetrator of senseless violence. There are no easy answers to be found, either in the film or in real life. There's no way to perfectly contextualize why bad things happen to some people but not to others, no parity between one person's suffering and their neighbor's. In Cure, there's only the apocalyptic banging of a pipe, the flicker of a lighter, and a bloody X that could mean anything or nothing at all.

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