Kiyoshi Kurosawa e the hypnosis of evil

Traduzione di Elena Ciullo

In the ample and stratified contemporary, or almost contemporary, Japanese cinema landscape, the name of Kiyoshi Kurosawa shines with a suffused, gloomy, restless and fascinating light. Born in 1955, in Kobe, Kurosawa has very few things in common with the namesake, in some ways more famous, Akira, among which the fact of not being his relative.

Over the years, Kiyoshi was able to gain a prominent role in the world of arthouse cinema, creating, with some of his masterpieces, the J-horror genre of the 90s and consequently to the psychological Japanese thriller, as we know it today. The look investigates the invisible, the inexplicable and the upsetting: Kurosawa was able to build a cohesive and deeply evocative filmography, where fear is never explicitly shouted but rather insinuated, whispered, left to sediment in the soul of the spectator. The movie discussed in this article is surely a prime example.

If Akira Kurosawa told about the epic of mankind, with samurai, natural disasters, moral dilemmas and debts of honour, Kiyoshi Kurosawa revealed their shadow, digging in the recesses of the psyche, between urban alienation and identity loss. Where the first used the cinema light to show the human being struggling with their consciousness, the second prefers the light and dark of the subconscious, livid environments, characters tired of the research they have undertaken, cities that seem to host more dead people than alive.

Cure (1997), now returned to the cinema and that is being played in the cinema near my home, I don’t know if this the case in the rest of Italy, is maybe the most powerful manifesto of this poetics. A psychological thriller that slowly insinuates under the skin, without relying on classic horror clichés. The movie follows a detective (Koji Yakusho) dealing with a series of inexplicable murders: each murderer is different, no motive, no apparent bond, except for a mysterious X engraved on the victims’ neck.

The evil, in Cure, is an infection that spreads through words, the look, the absence and the recurring actions of society. Hypnosis is the vehicle, but the real threat is the fragility of the human mind, the ease with which one can slip into oblivion.

Kurosawa breaks down every certainty, he doesn’t look for solutions nor provides reassurance: justice, rationality, even identity. The evil has no face and that’s exactly why it’s everywhere. The style is somber, essential, with long moments of silence and the narrative time envelops the spectator in atmosphere of growing discomfort. Few or many things in too small spaces to contain them or too large so that there can be no more. Each framing is studied to trigger tension, but also a sense of inescapability, as if the destiny of characters was already written- or worse, already forgotten.

A detective in search of his death, or the death of those close to him, in search of who or why, self-discovering, without finding a solution. He will become a smoker.

During a summer of sequels and digital superheroes, Cure comes back to remind us that cinema is not only made of action and box office, but also of little, precious, annoying gems that dig in our consciousness and lead us to think.

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