Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure is one of the greatest evocations of horror ever committed to celluloid, a film that largely subverts traditional modes of genre filmmaking to deliver a terrifying experience which is near epistemic in the horror it invokes about modernity. Following a familiar cop/killer framework, Cure's general narrative text is accessible from the onset, leaning into the mystery of these murders through the point-of-view of its lead protagonist - a cop who is tasked to solve the grisly crimes. Obfuscating the traditional expectations of this familiar conception - the discovery and satisfaction felt by a viewer through narrative closure, which in this case never comes, Cure reveals the truly horrific module it is operating on, one in which unconscious desires and all their moral attachments are far from repudiated by modernity but suppressed and perhaps even exacerbated by its normalization of "acceptable" social modes of living. These heinous acts of violence were not supernatural, they did not come from any form of mental illness or other socially constructed descriptors that absolves the larger collective of humanity instead, these desires are perhaps, just a part of human consciousness itself. The final denouement of Cure is particularly revealing to the film's subtext, in which the suggestion of more violence is coming, despite the killer at the fulcrum of the narrative being no more. Perhaps Cure isn't just about unconscious desires as a device for its examination of evil, but also about the void created by modernity in which individuals are forced to posit themselves and their defined identities around societal expectations. For our main protagonist, he is forced to wrestle with his professional and personal identities - as a husband and police officer, identities that don't often congeal particularly due to his wife's deteriorating health. Though Kurosawa's cinematic formalism that is completely devoid of empathy and exudes a consistent feeling of detachment, Cure percolates with dread more than outright induces it, the police detective at the fulcrum of this story deeply in pain which he has largely suppressed, symbolic in a sense of modernity itself. Suppression, either socially or individually, leads to instability and agitation, with the potential for abject violence being almost sure to follow.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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