Cure

Bluebeard in a spotless white room, the reader (Anna Nakagawa) is a mad housewife: "I know how the story ends." Her husband (Koji Yakusho) is an exhausted police detective negotiating a wave of grisly killings, seemingly unmotivated and unrelated but for the "x" carved into the victims' necks. The man who bludgeons a prostitute is found cowering, bare of body and mind, later on a tranquil shot of a two-story beach house is unsettled by the young teacher who leaps out the window after butchering his wife. "The devil made them do it is all I can guess," shrugs the psychiatrist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki). The conventional serial-killer metropolis is excremental and cluttered, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's is serenely lit and full of cunningly empty spaces. Clouds passing overhead lend the seaside scene half a dozen delicate gradations while the shambling figure in long shot is revealed as a wondering amnesic (Masato Hagiwara) with an insinuating request ("Tell me about yourself"). A self-described hollow man, using the flickering flame of a lighter or a puddle of water to seep into the psyches of others and plant murderous time bombs there. Jung and Kernberg are among the authors of choice in the culprit's junkyard library, with a special spot reserved for Mesmer, ou l'Extase Magnétique. "You know a lot, Detective." "Not what's inside your head." Fleischer's The Boston Strangler, Lumet's The Offence and Cohen's God Told Me To are valuable models. Kurosawa's great formal gambit is a veneer of detachment cracked by slashes to the eye's mind, in which fragmented identity—a faceless Mabuse in a yellowing newspaper, a rumbling voice emanating from a scratchy recorder—becomes the ultimate horror. Frost infuses the enveloping realization, "I am too absent-spirited to count / The loneliness includes me unawares." With Yoriko Doguchi, Yukijiro Hotaru, Denden, and Ren Osugi.