Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Big Year

Born in 1955, “marked by the American cinema of the ’70s, and having honed his craft as a director of low-budget and straight-to-video movies beginning in the ’80s, Kurosawa was, by the late ’90s, well versed in the strategies by which a filmmaker can challenge producers’ and audiences’ expectations while playing at satisfying them,” wrote Chris Fujiwara in his 2022 essay on Cure (1997), “the film that won him international attention and set the pattern for his subsequent career.” Fujiwara suggests that “like Jacques Tourneur, Kurosawa is a filmmaker less interested in depicting a world where demons run amok and supernatural causality has free rein than in traveling along the border between the everyday and the supernatural.”

Kurosawa’s “most powerful films,” writes Adam Nayman for Film Comment, “whether sinister enigmas like Cure and Charisma (1999) or deceptively conventional dramas à la Tokyo Sonata (2008), tend to be styled as metaphysical riddles, their ambiguity deepened and rendered all the more disorienting by the director’s uniquely pellucid mise en scène. Kurosawa’s framing derives some of its fearful symmetry (and axial cutting patterns) from Kubrick, but mostly minus the magisterial bombast. His interior spaces are profoundly ordinary, transformed into loci of terror by careful gradations of focus or lighting design, or else decisive turns of performance and tone.”

Chime “could be a spiritual sequel” to Cure, writes Nayman, and it’s “great not because it refuses interpretation or analysis, but because it welcomes it, secure in the knowledge—at once apt and hopelessly bleak—that coherence is of little consolation in a contingent universe.” A sound heard only by those it infects drives students at a cooking school to commit inexplicably brutal acts, and the seemingly imperturbable teacher (Mutsuo Yoshioka) eventually succumbs to the contagion.

At In Review Online, Fred Barrett finds Chime “permeated” by a kind of “narcotized insanity, one that renders even physical violence unsettlingly dull.” For MUBI’s Daniel Kasman, the film “has the deeply satisfying purity of a thing done right and done well: no shot wasted, no moment without charge. The ambition is limited, which allows the execution maximum effectiveness. Every part of the film is tuned to coax dread from the bountifully fertile ground for unease and dislocation that is everyday existence in a big city.”

The original Serpent’s Path, “which features yakuza genre star Show Aikawa and the Kabuki-trained Teruyuki Kagawa at the top of their respective games, is a cult classic,” writes Mark Schilling in the Japan Times. Aikawa’s Nijima aims to assist Kagawa’s Miyashita, who is determined to exact revenge on a man he’s sure had a hand in the killing of his eight-year old daughter. But the man they torture gives them the name of a likelier suspect, a name that leads to another, which then leads to another, and before long, Nijima and Miyashita find themselves in too deep. The new remake features Damien Bonnard, Ko Shibasaki, and Mathieu Amalric, and Schilling finds that it “delivers the requisite shocks and chills, while probing the depths of human deception and depravity with an unblinking gaze.”

For Sean Gilman at In Review Online, Kurosawa is “arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade.” Gilman proposes that Chime is to Cure what Cloud is to Creepy (2006), “an exploration of the everyday evil next door that begins as one kind of suspense thriller before moving into the territory of a violent genre film. In Creepy, the monster under investigation is the family and neighborly relations; in Cloud, the villain is just as archetypal: capitalism itself.”

Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is a factory worker who discovers that he can make a lot more money buying up products on the cheap and selling them online at unreasonably high prices under the name Ratel, which, as Jordan Mintzer points out in the Hollywood Reporter, “means ‘badger’ in Japanese but also sounds like ‘retail.’” Yoshii is “smart enough to rig the internet into a trap, but not smart enough to avoid getting caught in it himself, which makes him both a clear villain and an all too relatable fool,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich.

About halfway through Cloud, Yoshii’s frustrated customers find each other, band together, and go after him. “Until this point,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety, “the drama has been loosely plausible, unfolding in a realist register enriched by DP Yasuyuki Sasaki’s classy cinematography, which makes even the most prosaic, underfurnished backdrop rich with shadow and lurking peril.” But for Slant’s Chuck Bowen, “an eerie social thriller has been hijacked by sharp yet familiar gunplay. Also inescapable is that Kurosawa expressed a similar notion of social decay in Chime in a third of Cloud’s running time without losing the menacing air of mystery that pervades his greatest films.”

“For all the genre flourishes,” writes Nicolas Rapold for Sight and Sound, “Kurosawa is illustrating how the internet can facilitate the radicalization of the worst of human behavior and help people connect and manifest it in the world at large.” Introducing his interview with Kurosawa for Filmmaker, Leonardo Goi argues that Cloud “unfolds as a capitalist farce that steers clear of pandering or didacticism. Peddling trite platitudes about the dangers of e-commerce and liberal economies isn’t what the writer-director’s after. Instead of lessons, Cloud yields delightful pleasures; as in his best, Kurosawa here toggles between genres (horror, action and comedy) with astonishing deftness, and the playfulness the film radiates throughout is nothing short of contagious.”

Goi’s questions have Kurosawa looking back a few decades to when he was making such films as Cure and Pulse (2001). “We were not beholden to any sense of duty toward society,” he says. “I could imagine this or that malaise, and make a film about it, it didn’t matter. Now I’m not so sure anymore. The world has changed so much, and maybe our future isn’t as bright as it used to look back then. Maybe now the big enemy, the real malaise, isn’t new technologies or some occult entity, but ourselves.”