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Review

Danger After Dark Review:
Cure director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has become one of Japan’s most prolific and gifted genre filmmakers, a sort of cerebral cousin to Takashi Miike in filmmaking spirit. Hypnotic and meditative, Kurosawa’s films tend to subvert and reinvent genre through conceptual rather than aesthetic means, creating subtle character-driven stories that nonetheless generate a remarkable sense of menace and fear. Cure was Kurosawa’s international breakthrough film in 1997, and it still stands as his most effective thriller. An eerie and unsettling serial-killer yarn about a former psychology student who is obsessed with Franz Mesmer and manages to hypnotize his victims into murdering one another, CURE remains Kurosawa’s finest effort to date – and it ushered in a period of remarkable creative fertility which has seen the director become an international film festival favorite. But whereas some of the filmmaker’s subsequent work has proven too elliptical in narrative approach for many viewers, Cure strikes a perfect balance between the enigmatic plotting that lends Kurosawa’s films such a peculiar tone of eerie suspense, and an effective use of more familiar horror cinema techniques that ground the film within the genre.

 -- Travis Crawford