Cure is a Japanese horror movie from 1997. The movie came out around the same time as The Ring, The Grudge, and Audition. These 4 movies seem to be great classic horror movies. I've only seen the remakes so I think watching all 4 in the original Japanese will be fun.
Cure is gorgeously shot and builds up nicely. There were a few standout scenes that I think will stick with me but I missed the ending and didn't get the point.
The movie is slow paced but the characters are interesting enough that I didn't notice the two hours that the movie took. The movie is a bit dated but I do like that so thats a bonus for me.
Cure is about a detective investigating a series of murders where the victims have and X slashed across their throat. Each victim is killed by someone close to them and that person is the actual killer. They simply don't remember anything and feel like the devil told them to do it.
The detective, Takabe, beleives that someone is hypnotising people and getting them to commit the murders. We actually meet the villain right away and it's someone without any real sense of self or memory. He just walks around helpless and anyone who helps him, he hypnotises them into becoming a murderer. He was an aggravating character, I imagine much like dealing with anyone with memory loss.
He functions normally for moments but then he will be ignorant moments later. Trying to get any sort of information out of them is an exercise in futility. Mamiya was this.
I'm not sure how the detective figured out the hypnotism part but after that he finds Mamiya pretty quickly. We find out that the boy is a psychology student who got deep into mesmerism and may have touched something occult from the 1800s.
The reason for the murders or motivations to hypnotise people never comes and for the most the movie is just pretty to look at, atmospheric and vaguely interesting. There was never really a mystery to solve and there wasn't some driving force. We just watched a middle aged japanese man catch someone.
There was no real horror aspects to the movie and I think that was on purpose.
The sounds and music were great and I admired the way things were designed and framed.
I'd give the movie a 3.5/5, as much as it wasn't horror, it was worth watching.
The ending, maybe if I caught it would have been better. I must have looked away, I later read that the hypnotism has transfered to Takabe and that he gets a waitress to pick up a knife, implying that he is getting her to kill someone.