Let me give you a hint to take your movie fan snobbery to another level. In one of your casual yet classy chats with your friends about all things cinema, mention Kurosawa: wait for them to bring up Akira, Throne of Blood, the classics. And then, with a slight air of smugness, raise your eyebrows and chuckle knowingly. “Oh, no,” you reply. “I meant the other Kurosawa”.
All this to say: Kiyoshi Kurosawa is an amazing director, and you should give his work a try if you haven’t already. The Japanese auteur has been working since the 1980s, but he’s probably best known to Western audiences for his 2001 horror movie Pulse, which was remade in America in 2006.
Pulse was certainly how I found out about him. It’s a tech horror set in Tokyo, as ghosts enter the world via the internet – compared to most other tech horrors from this era, it holds up incredibly well. It’s a really bold and interesting take on the haunting narrative, going bigger in scale and execution than most others in the genre, and, even outside of some exquisitely good scare sequences, has an atmosphere dripping with unease and dread from minute one.
It’s something that’s present in a lot of his movies, actually – Kurosawa has a unique eye for creating a discomforting atmosphere that pervades his whole stories, even when nothing overtly horrible is happening (though it often is). One of his earliest works, Cure, released in 1997, is a perfect example of this – a sort of crime thriller-cum-psychic-torture-nightmare, it’s one of the most profoundly disturbing and memorable horror movies of the decade. It’s also his first collaboration with Koji Yakusho, who would go on to lead some of Kurosawa’s most accomplished movies, like Tokyo Sonata, as well as starring in modern classics like Babel and 13 Assassins. When it comes to Cure, the most convincing thing I can tell you is that the brilliant Bong Joon-ho called it one of the best films of all time, and if that isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what will be.
One of the things I love most about Kurosawa is how he’s kept that eye for disturbing filmmaking deep into his career – even as he gets more polished (and let’s face it, he didn’t exactly start out looking amateurish), he spins these totally twisted stories with a distinct and distinctly nasty feel. Creepy, which came out in 2016, is a slow-building family drama that just so happens to feature a terrifying neighbour to make everything a whole lot more interesting. That third act is spectacularly nasty, but the pacing teases out into almost unbearable tension in the process, buoyed by a great and suitably creepy performance from Teruyuki Kagawa.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a true joy of a director to watch, taking horror to an exceptional level of prestige I’m always looking for in the genre. Consider this article your sign to go catch up on his extensive and brilliant back catalogue – the three I focused on in this article are great places to start, but there’s so much more to explore to. Are you a fan of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work? Let me know in the comments!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Inverse)
No But Listen 