In the Flesh: Cure

As inspector Takabe, Kōji Yakusho is like a crumbling monolith, his initial patience and even affect disintegrating as Cure progresses until either nothing remains of the man he was or else his true self is exposed. It all depends on how you look at it. “My wife is a burden,” he snarls at the imprisoned Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), a man who seems to leave senseless ritualistic murder in his wake like a tanker trailing a black ribbon of crude oil. Mamiya has no memory, no ability to form a coherent self. His mental and spiritual emptiness are a repellent echo of Takabe’s wife’s (Anna Nakagawa) mental decline and instability, a similarity which again and again draws deep-seated rage out of the habitually placid Takabe as he attempts to solve the mystery of how Mamiya kills without ever dirtying his own hands.

The film’s sequences of violence are hideously matter-of-fact, the tone set by a scene in which a middle-aged man beats a woman to death with a pipe while Gary Ashiya’s lighthearted ‘Animal Magnetism’ plays. In another, we watch a doctor calmly peel a dead man’s face off on the floor of a public restroom, the camera pulling back, showing us this intimate transgression with a mixture of distance and corner-of-your-eye horror. What purpose do these murders serve? Are they religious rites? Do they sate some deep psychosexual need? “Everything that was inside of me is now outside,” says Mamiya, offering a cryptic hint at his bizarre mental condition. “My insides are hollow.” Is he speaking as the foil for the repressed and frustrated Takabe? Does he represent unrestrained Id, the flat cruelty of a child pulling wings off of flies?

The film’s ambiguous ending suggests something to that effect. Mamiya is both a normal man and, symbolically, only a conduit for a greater and more terrible unmapped region of the psyche. He has opened himself up so completely that no trace of him remains but the things he once tried to hide from the world, which now dance freely in the air and aether. His dominion over others requires the mediation of hypnosis, the presence of a focus such as a lighter’s flickering flame or the slow glide of water over linoleum. That he seems unable to drive Takabe to kill forms the crux of their mutual fascination; he both represents and provokes the detective’s repressed brutality and rage, though Cure hints that the answer to this may lie not in any moral or spiritual fortitude on Takabe’s part, but in the most banal domestic detail. The endless whir and thump of his empty washing machine, which his confused wife runs non-stop, has rendered him proof against Mamiya’s hypnotic techniques. It is the very life by which he feels so oppressed and which he so resents that insulates him from Mamiya’s senseless, wanton violence.