Sam Warren Miell: Unplaceable Terror

Cure, dir. by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Japan, 1997)

Dominic Lash, Cure (The British Film Institute, 2024), ISBN 9781839025945, 104 pp.

Early in this book, from the most recent set of additions to the BFI’s long-running Film Classics series, Dominic Lash declares that ‘Cure is one of a select group of films that get stranger the more one watches them.’ Towards the end, he reaffirms how ‘Cure renders treacherous the familiar procedures of cinematic hermeneutics.’ If he is right – and, to put my cards on the table from the start, I think he is – this presents the author with a formidable problem. How is he going to dedicate 90 or so pages to analysing a film that appears designed to evade the grasp of analysis altogether? His solution, for the most part, is a simple one: to pay as close attention as possible to the filmic materials out of which Cure is composed – camera angles, editing, blocking, performance, set and sound design.

   This might seem an obvious strategy, but in a landscape of film writing dominated by an overwhelming focus on narrative and thematic content, in which formal choices usually have to be extremely overt to garner attention, it isn’t. That status quo is particularly ill-suited for a movie such as this one. Cure was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s sixteenth film, and his return to theatrical releases after an extremely prolific period working for the straight-to-video market (known as V-Cinema in Japan). It is a genre piece about a spate of murders committed by seemingly ordinary people who have been hypnotised by a mysterious stranger. Throughout the film, we follow both the culprit, Mamiya, and the detective assigned to the case, Takabe. What is special about Cure, though, is not the story that unfolds so much as the unusual and unsettling feeling that Kurosawa is able to create and sustain throughout, which exceeds the film’s horrific incidents and somehow attaches itself to every element onscreen, from traffic lights to tumble dryers. As Lash puts it, ‘things can seem strange without one being able quite to put one’s finger on what it is that is upsetting’. Professional critics and amateur enthusiasts alike have tended to have a sense of this without being able to illuminate what’s behind what they are responding to. This has left much of the writing on Cure imprecise and unsatisfying, trading on weighty descriptors and ripe prose that tries to recreate this effect in another medium rather than examining how it is achieved in this one.

   It's also the case that, at least outside of Japan, Cure has an outsized popularity compared to Kurosawa’s other work. To use a crude but probably broadly accurate metric, it has around 93,000 ‘likes’ on the social platform Letterboxd, more than twice as many as Kurosawa’s next most ‘liked’ film, Pulse (2001), and almost seven times as many as third-place Tokyo Sonata (2008). As a result Cure has become something of an island, its reception cut off from a fuller understanding of a large filmography whose recurring array of formal interests might be able to illuminate it.

   In this short book, Lash does not have much explicit recourse to Kurosawa’s other films, but it is clear that he has spent a lot of time examining the specifics of how Kurosawa directs. This allows Lash to build his picture of Cure up from its use of what he justifiably calls ‘the common language of cinema’. For Kurosawa has never depended on ostentatious or surrealistic devices; if he did, his films would be easier to write about and less upsetting. Like Tobe Hooper, perhaps his most important and telling influence, his directing is largely rooted in a notion of mise en scène that would have been recognisable in the 1950s. The twist comes, as Lash puts it, in ‘the way he is able to deploy’ these means ‘so as to create a treacherous middle ground between the ordinary and the extraordinary’.

   And Lash, to his great credit, actually tries to explain how this is done. An early example concerns the introduction of the character of Mamiya. This is done using a shot/reverse-shot, which as Lash explains ‘is one of the simplest, and yet most important, rhetorical devices in narrative cinema’, so familiar to a film viewer as to pass by almost transparently. We see a first shot, then a shot of a person in the same locale looking into the space beyond the camera’s perspective, and without giving it a second thought we assume that the first shot represented their point of view. But in the case in question, the first shot is of an empty beach, and there is a third shot of almost the same composition, except with a figure – Mamiya – present. In Lash’s words, ‘since he is present in the third shot but not the first, the impression given is that the man in the long coat has materialised out of thin air’. Yet because the film refuses to underline this inconsistency, it hovers somewhere between the noticeable and the subliminal. As Lash remarks, ‘one perhaps assumes he was there in the first shot, but that one somehow missed him’. If it is at all possible to trace Cure to its basic mechanics, it is in these sorts of moments that one should look, and in the effect their accumulation may have. It is in Kurosawa’s use of a film rhetoric that is not heightened but somehow drained of its own rhetoricity that he achieves an unease that slowly mounts into unplaceable terror.

   One of the virtues of Lash’s approach is to retain a strong reference throughout to the phenomenology of film watching, as opposed to prevalent film theoretical approaches that tend to abstract from the real-time experience of viewing. This is particularly necessary in the case of Cure because, as the remarks with which I opened suggest, it is a film uncommonly sensitive to rewatching, morphing under the viewer’s gaze. Lash specifies when a sequence of events ‘is nigh-on impossible to put […] together on a first viewing’, and when the relationship between minor details across the film’s running time is coloured by how ‘it is extremely difficult on a first viewing to recall that we saw’ such and such a detail. He is interested not only in confusion and ambiguity as moods generated by the film but in the specifics of their genesis, zeroing in on the moments at which it may become equally possible to believe or not believe that ‘we have firmly departed from reality’, or when a partial ‘certainty’ that the film may have allowed to develop in the mind of the viewer ‘is revoked’, and elucidating these in relation to the temporal accretions and modulations Kurosawa is so adept at achieving.

   The monograph format of the Film Classics series affords its contributors an opportunity to spend more time describing the course of a film – ‘we see x do y, framed in a z shot, and then…’ – than can typically be accommodated in reviews, book chapters or articles. Lash takes us through the film chronologically and quite painstakingly, and if this can seem a little clumsy, it is likely necessary when the object is to straighten out what is always in danger of knotting itself back into a hermetic ball. An approach that tried to be more structurally inventive would likely run the risk of falling back on exercises in analogical style, or find itself relying on a search for depths that might well ignore the complexity of the surface. Where Kurosawa’s method produces madness, a sober method is required to recover its logic.

   A common reading of Cure sees it as a tale in which a vague, diffuse social anger is given free rein, unleashing the murderer latent in the ordinary citizen. Lash resists this interpretation, and I think rightly, not only because it closes the film’s strangeness down on a rather pat, misanthropic thesis that doesn’t seem to do justice to the disquiet the film produces, but because, as he eloquently writes, ‘A lesson that Cure keeps teaching us […] is that an explanation cannot guarantee us relief from whatever it is that drove us to look for one.’ Kurosawa himself has resisted readings that take Cure to be an allegory, whether for late-twentieth century Japan or contemporary society in general. But beyond questions of authorial intention, Lash shows how this sociologising recourse is itself an avatar of the very impetus to restore actions to the order of efficient causes that repeatedly comes up short in the film itself. The book’s most extended thematic discussion concerns the philosophical questions of intention that the film raises, especially in scenes in which the murderers are at a loss to account for their actions: ‘even if we cannot coherently conceive of a world in which it was never possible to find an answer to the question of why somebody did something, the reactions of those that Mamiya hypnotises give us a glimpse into such a world.’ As far as the conclusions that might be drawn from Cure are concerned, Lash stays on the side of the negative and the minimal, and he’s wise to do so.

   Cure is integrally cinematic, which is to say that any discussion that attempts to separate some narrative or thematic content from the film’s mise en scène is doomed from the outset. Kurosawa thinks filmically, rather than attempting to give external ideas filmic form; there is not a set of beliefs, and perhaps not even a subject matter in any ordinary sense, to which Cure responds. In this way he is closer to Jean-Luc Godard or Howard Hawks than to the contemporary horror directors who brandish him as an influence, and like Godard and Hawks he ought to give rise to a critical literature that finds ways to approach cinema as something that does different things to any other art form, and does them in different ways. Lash relates an anecdote of Kurosawa at a Sundance screenwriting residency in the early 1990s, writing what would become his 1999 film Charisma. Faced with incessant questions from American participants as to the motivations of his characters, Kurosawa would reply: ‘He doesn’t have any intent. He’s just being.’ His films give us a chance to see the beauty and horror of what cinema does when, freed from subordination to other mediums and from any extrinsic social or cultural agenda, it’s just being.

Sam Warren Miell is a writer and film programmer from London