People are turning up dead, and the murders are connected by a similarity in the mutilation of the corpses. However, each murder seems to have been committed by a different person--a person who, in some cases, was a close relative or acquaintance of the victim. Eventually the police discover that an amnesiac man has turned up at many of the murder sites. This man, though, seems to have neither long-term nor short-term memories; he often cannot remember a question long enough to answer it. A certain police detective Katabe follows a trail to uncover the man's dangerous secrets, and he risks getting far more involved than he should.
"Cure" treads similar psychic territory to "The Cell" and "Paperhouse" while avoiding the shared-dream phenomenon and relying on imagery which is much more subtle and often more effective. The director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is consistently elliptical in his methods--meaning that he leaves certain gaps in the film and invites the audience to fill them in. Well-considered ingenuity is good, but abstraction taken to the point of chaos is bad. When it comes to imagery, Kurosawa's elliptical method compliments his audience, assuming that people can make certain necessary logical deductions, associating visual cues with their psychic equivalent. But when this technique is applied to plot, things get a little messy. Something is definitely wrong when, even after the film is finished, the audience has to wonder: When did this particular event occur? Who did it? Did it really happen or not? Such questions plague the film's ending, and confusion in a plot-dependent film is, quite obviously, bad.
Regardless of its flaws, "Cure" is a welcome addition to the genre for its spare use of graphic imagery and for the attitude of intellectual respect Kurosawa shows his audience.
"Cure" treads similar psychic territory to "The Cell" and "Paperhouse" while avoiding the shared-dream phenomenon and relying on imagery which is much more subtle and often more effective. The director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is consistently elliptical in his methods--meaning that he leaves certain gaps in the film and invites the audience to fill them in. Well-considered ingenuity is good, but abstraction taken to the point of chaos is bad. When it comes to imagery, Kurosawa's elliptical method compliments his audience, assuming that people can make certain necessary logical deductions, associating visual cues with their psychic equivalent. But when this technique is applied to plot, things get a little messy. Something is definitely wrong when, even after the film is finished, the audience has to wonder: When did this particular event occur? Who did it? Did it really happen or not? Such questions plague the film's ending, and confusion in a plot-dependent film is, quite obviously, bad.
Regardless of its flaws, "Cure" is a welcome addition to the genre for its spare use of graphic imagery and for the attitude of intellectual respect Kurosawa shows his audience.