Let’s Get Criterion/Horrorfest 2023 Presents: キュア, Kyua aka Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)


Evil! Evillllll! Evvvvvilll!

I’ll admit there much to admire about キュア, Kyua aka Cure, and a lot of the movie was very creepy, with the rest of the movie retaining an eerie quality that causes events to not let your brain. On the other hand I’m not sure I understood the last act of the movie, and that’s my fault. Still I’ll have to ask people what it was about, and that results in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 effort getting lower marks from me than it should. Blame the viewer, not the artist, yet on the other hand shouldn’t the artist not confuse the viewer so much at times? I doubt I’ll revisit this one anytime soon, but I will offer up praise for Koji Yakusho’s world wary, always exhausted detective who is confronted with pure evil. I suppose we don’t really believe in evil until we encounter it in different forms, and also in people. The concept seems very much the subject of books and well, movies, yet in real life most of the time things aren’t so clear and obvious. Then you see something like murder, or mass genocide, or people being cruel to their fellow persons, and you realize evil does exist. Sometimes things are rather cut and dried.

On the other hand, the main villain of the movie seems to have this charismatic mind Jedi power grip on people that he refuses to let go of, because it makes him into a bigger man when he’s in fact a little one. Masato Hagiwarais great in that role, offering up this casual indifference to the crimes he may or may not be committing. Thanks to this movie I’ll never hear a lighter going off the same way again, and I do remember vividly the ending despite not being sure if I was seeing what the Wikipedia page for this movie tells me I was viewing. Maybe I’ll re-watch this movie down the road, perhaps not, and for now I prefer Kurosawa’s 回路, Kairo; Circuit aka Pulse more, and find that one a bit more satisfying.

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