Cure

[martenb]

Can someone explain what I missed in this film? I saw a really positive endorsement of it from someone I trust (I wanna say Spry, but I forget) and it really just fell very flat for me. I get the sense that there's something I missed, but for the life of me I just didn't see it.

Comments

[blurrymystr]

it was Spry!

[writerspry]

Guilty as charged.

Eh, either it got under your skin or it didn't. For my money, the scene where the detective interrogates the mesmerist in the cell and that creeping darkness invades the frame and the rest of the film you're untethered as you're trying to figure out what may have happened in the gap and you're questioning everything...

That scene, and a couple of choice moments that follow, really made the film for me. If it didn't strike you as anything interesting, you may have a different sweet tooth for horror. Nothing at all wrong with that.

It's not a perfect film by any means.

[martenb]

Well, the thing is, both of us immediately said we'd gotten the sense that there was something we were missing. I might need to give it another go. I think part of the issue is we were watching on a fairly crappy TV from kinda far away, which made it difficult to tell 1. Who was in a given scene, 2. What was happening and 3. If some effects were actually in the film or just visual quirks (like the aforementioned creeping darkness).

To an extent I think Kurosawa might have gotten just a bit too far into the subtle side of creeping horror, but the motif of harmful sensation is one of the things that really gets under my skin. Who knows, it might just not be my film, but I think I'm gonna rent it again and give it a chance under more ideal circumstances.