HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 18
Six decades: 1st of 2 films from the 90's

Well, if you want a great horror film from the late 90's, look to Japan, that's what I always say. No really - I say that ALL the time.

When I think of great Japanese horror directors, I always seem to forget about Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Maybe that's because while the likes of Miike and Sono are flamboyantly tearing down cinema conventions and taboo boundaries with attention-drawing glee, Kurosawa has always just quietly and confidently gotten on with his own thing.

There's an argument that he might be one of the most gifted genre film makers of his generation, from a formal point of view at least. Cure is genuinely stately in the way it is structured and filmed. The long, wide angle takes are more Tarkovsky than Tarantino. This feels like a horror/thriller for adults. Despite employing the drab, brown colour scheme of a lot of J-horror films from this era, there wasn't a shot sequence in Cure that wasn't visually interesting in some way. I love films with texture to the cinematography - where we're not just relying on lighting and angles and framing, but also the judicious selection of what exactly appears in frame. In Cure every location has a visual character and a narrative purpose. In other words, this is some virtuoso shit, folks.

Like his prior classic, Kairo (Pulse), the storyline to this film is intentionally obscure and slow to reveal its secrets - or at least, those secrets it's ultimately willing to reveal. Although very much a police / detective procedural, the quasi-supernatural basis for the killer's MO takes this into dark, genuine horror territory. But this is subtle horror - the kind that requires you to really reflect on the horror of what is happening to the characters.

Koji Yakusho is outstanding in the lead role of Inspector Takabe - a man who conceals his own desperation of a life struggling to treat his mentally ill wife beneath a laconic exterior, and as the film progresses we see how sudden bursts of uncontrollable violence spring forth from him. Yakusho reminds me of a Japanese Clive Owen - which makes me wonder how this film was overlooked when these J-horror films were all being remade in America in the aughts (when Clive Owen was still a bankable star - they missed a trick there). Or was there a remake of this which sunk without a trace?

The final act will leave a few scratching their heads and is bound to frustrate many, but I was relieved it managed to preserve the poetic sense of the rest of the film, rather than reverting to some kind of hackneyed cop-villain trope.

I definitely have to try harder to watch more Kiyoshi Kurosawa - I have a feeling there are a lot more gems to unearth here.