Originally published 19th January 2015 on my Tumblr. I'm moving some old writing from there over here because it's nice to have it all in one place. It's also nice to look back once in a while.
The world of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure is a blank space. Almost entirely interior, the rooms occupied by the unlucky characters are uncluttered and bare, painted off-white and meticulously organised. Posters, the few there are, are geometrically pinned to walls, while the desks and shelves boast small filing cabinets and folders. The only unregimented space in the film belongs to its antagonist, amnesiac drifter Mamiya, whose apartment is littered with books on personality disorders, mesmerism, and psychoanalysis, six month old leftovers and the decomposing corpse of a monkey, tied to a pipe with its arms and legs folded across its body.
Mamiya is manipulating people, who he meets in seemingly chance encounters, into murdering somebody close to them through a form of hypnotisation. His methods are shown in long, mostly static sequences but never explained, and his motivation is never addressed. His odd presence in scenes, nonchalantly luring his victims in conversational circles before stunning them with the flame from his lighter or the slow trickle of a spilt glass of water, stands out immediately as something that shouldn't be there: in his first scene, he suddenly appears on a beach; later, he appears on the roof of a building.
His abrupt appearances make no logical sense, but Kurosawa seems more interested in the idea of how a man like this can exist in such a calm world than trying to explain his actions. Mamiya shows no empathy when his experiments turn people into murderers, as if he's testing his abilities on lab rats, not human beings, and, as the police finally work out who he is, the revelation of his solitary existence suggests a disconnect from both society and basic human interaction — which, in Kurosawa's cinema, is the root of all evil.