Creepy (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

[Dead & Messed Up]

https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpr ess.com/2016/03/creepy-kiyoshi-kurosawa-japanese-thriller-movie-2016-poster.png?w=473&h=668

A domestic thriller from the man who gave you Cure, Pulse, and Tokyo Sonata.

[Peng]

I previously thought I already posted my thoughts on it in a thread here (glad you liked it too), so here goes:

A film of two halves, brilliantly conceived and formally assured in both, but a bit conflicted in transition. The normal exterior of the first half has a darkness of the human psyche and societal distances always simmering underneath, given to bursts of many "off" moments. And then the second half is almost all "off", with a lot of struggling to get back to that normalness again.

The first is just so magnificently, suggestively [titular adjective], even by the smallest things like lives passing by outsides the protagonist's office while he's immersed further and further into this old case. The second half, meanwhile, I love the idea of, but still can't quite reconcile with how it is transitioned from the first. It doesn't feel like Kurosawa pushes us into the surreal enough for some "off" moments/behaviors to not feel slightly frustrating during this half, in the way contrivances and dumb, death-wishing behaviors in many American slashers feel. Still consistently engaging at least because the formal creepiness is off the chart throughout, and the second half not feeling as special and making me conflicted only means it just almost belongs in the year's top ten; as is (if we're discounting Green Room as one), it's my favorite horror film of 2016. 8/10

[Dead & Messed Up]

Creepy is the first of Kurosawa's films I've seen since trying to wrap my head around the discomforting but watchable Tokyo Sonata (many loved it, I... definitely watched it).

And I'm surprised by how steady, straightforward, and still engaging the film is.

It's a crime thriller about a detective (with a specialty in serial killers) who got Too Close to a Case, and after it went sour, he Leaves That Life Behind. But he gets pulled back by a friend of a colleague. See, there was this case six years ago, never solved, where a father/mother/son went missing, and only the daughter survived, and she doesn't remember what happened.

At the same time, his wife busies herself at their new house, and she meets an odd neighbor who seems to alternate between socially inept utterances and piercing questions. He's protective of his house one minute. He happily invites her in the next.

Eventually, the two stories merge (as they must), but how they slide into each other is satisfying as hell, because Kurosawa works his ass off to get you there. You get peeks at the detective's obsession with being able to solve cases, his wife's frustration and discomfort being "the wife," two young girls carrying crucial secrets, and, best of all, the next door neighbor.

He's played by Teruyuki Kagawa, and the actor's so much damn fun to watch, because you're constantly watching his big eyes, his smiles (which almost always look fake, or like someone trying too hard). He's twitchy at times, eerily graceful other times. Someone's review compared him to Peter Lorre, and that's so goddamn right that it hurts.

Kurosawa's direction remains steady as ever, although I'm sure for some that direction comes off more slow than steady. But I love how he dramatizes enough menace at certain key locations (a gate, a house entryway, a street corner) that just seeing them eventually quickens your pulse. The film also carries some of that sallow coloration you'll see in some of David Fincher's work (burnt yellows and ambers) but with enough variation in the earthy browns of the detective's house to avoid too-direct comparisons (and charges of secondhand hackery).

I'm surprised by how engaged I was, but even moreso, how I'm still thinking about the film's situations and the underlying ideas of imprisonment and training. This is a great slow cooker of a movie, but like Kurosawa's best stuff, it gets better after it's over.

SIDEBAR: I watched the film courtesy of Kanopy.com, which may be freely available to you if you have a public library card for Los Angeles, New York, or Brooklyn. I'm also checking to see which other libraries use the service. 10 free movies a month, with Criterion Collection options, is a pretty great deal.

[Stay Puft]

I still haven't seen this, but Michael Sicinski's review for it is my favorite thing:
https://letterboxd.com/msicism/film/creepy/

[Ezee E]

Oh shit, Kiyoshi has a new movie out?

[Stay Puft]

He has a few, actually. He has already released two more movies since Creepy. I've seen one of them, Daguerrotype, and it's... okay-ish, but a marked step down from his earlier efforts.

[Dead & Messed Up]

Yeah, I'm curious about that new alien one. And I also need to catch up with Bright Future.