Well-Crafted ‘Cure’ Has the Power to Unsettle

The string of bizarre murders. The master criminal. The stubborn detective testing his will against an evil genius. All the usual genre suspects show up in the haunting and persuasive “Cure,” but this is not the usual psychological thriller. Not even close.

The first film of prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa to be released in this country, “Cure” makes having it both ways look easy and natural. It creates excitement with pulp elements while playing games with genre expectations, pushing at the boundaries of narrative convention--not to mention your mind--while obliquely commenting on the alienating tendencies of modern society. And all without overplaying its hand or doing anything forced.

With perhaps 20 films, including direct-to-video items, to his credit in a career that began in 1983, writer-director Kurosawa (no relation to the more celebrated director Akira Kurosawa) has crafted a beautifully made film, put together with elegance, control and a confident precision.

Kurosawa also has an eye for casting actors who wholly embody the characteristics he’s seeking. For his world-weary detective Takabe, battling with the strangest forces of his career, the director has lured one of Japan’s most popular performers, “Shall We Dance’s” Koji Yakusho.

Working with an astute psychologist colleague named Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), Takabe is investigating a singular series of murders, highly unusual as much for how the victims are put to death as for the state of mind of the killers.

For although each person is executed in the same bizarre way--a huge X slicing them open from throat to chest and cutting their carotid arteries, a technique the film only hints at visually--different people do the attacking every time.

Even more unusual, the killers seem to be completely normal people who suddenly lash out with knives as if that was the most natural thing in the world. Interviewed after the crimes, they describe themselves as “stunned” and act as if they’ve been somehow removed to a distance from everyday reality.

Gradually, “Cure” directs our attention to a shuffling, nondescript drifter (Masato Hagiwara) who seems lost, disoriented and even memory-less as he wanders the city. There’s an eeriness about this character in Hagiwara’s unsettling performance, about his inability to remember things, his lack of a sense of identity or even self, coupled with the ability to ask disturbing questions like “Why am I talking to you?” Wherever he goes, death seems to follow, but the connection between the two is not immediately clear.

As he tries to puzzle out the motivations for these crimes, Takabe starts to lose his personal bearings as well. He turns out to have a wife who runs an empty washing machine all day and is being quietly overtaken by mental illness. And the detective’s seemingly normal world starts to present him with characters such as a man standing patiently at a cleaners who suddenly starts to mutter horrible obscenities under his breath.

Perhaps what is most distinctive about “Cure” is that although it solves the crimes, its resolution offers us none of the genuine peace we ordinarily expect, no sense that anything has really been resolved. Can mere knowledge make a difference against pervasive hopelessness? Can the forces of order ever be a fair match for the power of the unconscious? With its gift for infusing uneasiness into every frame, Kurosawa’s moody, unnerving film continues to spook us even after the lights have gone on.

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No MPAA rating. Times guidelines: some brief moments of gruesome violence.

‘Cure’

Koji Yakusho: Takabe

Tsuyoshi Ujiki: Sakuma

Anna Nakagawa: Fumie

Masato Hagiwara: Mamiya

A Code Red and Daiei Co. Ltd. production, released by Cowboy Booking International. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Producers Tetsuya Ikeda, Satoshi Kanno. Executive producer Hiroyuki Kato. Screenplay Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematographer Takusho Kikumura. Editor Kan Suzuki. Music Gary Shiya. Production design Tomoyuki Maruo. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

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Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.