10/30: Cure

 

10/30

For the eve of All Hallows Eve I went with my first Japanese horror film of the year, Cure. This movie was recommended to me and is an interesting take on the Se7en-type thriller film. A detective is investigating a series of seemingly random murders where people kill people close to them and carve an X into their neck. Complicating things is his wife having her own mental issues at home as well as the discovery of the man that is hypnotizing people into committing the murders. The hair in the ointment, though, is that the hypnotizing man has a strange bout of short term memory loss and can't remember much of anything that happened even moments before. 

Honestly? I think I'd be far more annoyed by the memory loss than the brutal murders. Maybe that explains why the detective eventually snaps.

Cure in its structure is a bit of typical thriller (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but the trappings outside of that general structure are what make it a solid, different spin on the genre. Along with the antagonist the movie itself is hypnotic, slowly letting the story unravel and draw you in. The idea of a master hypnotist lulling you into murdering those close to you is a terrifying thought. Cure takes simplicity and does it with immense effectiveness, proving that you don't need complication for complication's sake. The subtlety of a small flame or dripping water is given a sense of fear here as it can be used to make you do horrible things completely out your control. The final scene shows this most effectively: no one is safe from being hypnotized by this power out of your control. Your impulses are no longer your own, and that's a pretty damn unsettling thought.

8/10