dir. Gakuryu Ishii - 1994
A police psychologist suspects her former lover of serial murders on the Tokyo subway.
This is the most underrated film I think I've ever seen in my life. Over the last two years, I have been watching more and more Japanese films and feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the "influential" and "classic" picks. This, along with the film’s director, I had never seen or heard anything about. To my surprise, it blew me away and now stands as one of my favorite films of all time! I jokingly call this Cure with a green hue because of their similar plotline of investigating serial murders accompanied by supernatural undertones. The music is swanky, the lead woman is in sunglasses, the editing is surreal and mind-bending. Yeah, I’m in.
There is a deep sense of foreboding with the cinematography, for as the mystery unravels, I became more and more uncomfortable with the shots and camera angles. There’s one particular scene from inside the facility that shows camera footage of a patient, and it goes on for an uncomfortably long time, only switching to new camera angles and sections, inching closer and closer. The middle did slow down a great deal and leaned more into dialogue, which I felt snapped me out of the magic for a little bit, but an exciting climax pulled me back in until the finish. This is truly a trailblazer in the surrealist psychological Japanese crime genre. If I had a nickel for every time I watched one of those, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice…
Watch if you Like — Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, jazz on a rainy night
Don’t Watch if you Hate — The color green, the hypnotist at the local fair
