Cure 4K 1997 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Detective Takabe and psychiatrist Sakuma are brought in to investigate a series of mysterious murders. A strange young man falls into the hands of the police and they are unable to communicate with the suspects.

Review 4K Movie

Who are you? The question is repeated so often that it sounds like water dripping from a faucet. A strange, seemingly out of thin air guy with a distracted look just keeps saying, “Who are you?” - and he's not satisfied with any of the answers. Name, job title, social status, marital status, political beliefs or religion. Suppose (oh, that stare could only be called absent-minded by habitual inattention), who are you?

The enigmatic Mamiya with his annoying psychoanalysis plays an obscure but obviously sinister role in a paradoxical series of murders: all the victims have their throats slashed crosswise in the same way, but the perpetrators are different people who don't even know each other. The mystery and strangeness of what is happening director Kiyoshi Kurosawa emphasizes all available means. His “Healing” - it's almost a theater of shadows in Japanese ascetic and some kind of homeless scenery, where every dark spot feels vague, but inevitable threat. The camera often peeks out from behind doors, creating a shaky and chilly effect of presence that makes you involuntarily shrug. The hallucinatory editing bizarrely mixes visions and reality, depriving the viewer of a point of reference, and the silence that reigns in the frame in the most tense moments is as deafening and suffocating as a pillow pressed against the face.

But Kurosawa, who until that point had specialized almost exclusively in low-budget horror films, definitely wanted to do more than just make things creepy. “Healing” is more of a variation on the theme of the rights of shivering creatures, who suddenly acquired power asserted in the most obvious and decisive way - taking the life of another person. And the main question is not when and how a clever police inspector will catch the dark demon Mamiya by the tail, but why ordinary - well-mannered, prosperous, sometimes even noble - people so easily agree to kill. And it's not about the mesmeric talents of the messenger of the dark side - one of the characters directly says: a person who considers murder a mortal sin will not kill under hypnosis. Yet the frightening sequence goes on and on, and in the behavior of the defendants relief palpably prevails over remorse. This ordinariness of evil, which makes it omnipresent and invincible, puts you into a semi-hypnotic stupor faster than any perfectly realized technical methods.

Kurosawa is far from moralizing, and the heavy, under the spoon sucking ending hardly gives hope for the desired cure, but in some cases fear may well be a preventive measure. Doubt, hammering in the temple, once again reminds that evil is not around, but inside, and this makes you think seriously under the muzzle aimed at the forehead “who are you?”.