I watched Cure (1997) at a cinema last night

2024-11-14

This post will contain spoilers for the movie.

My friend Yung Si has a membership to a particular cult cinema in London, which means he gets tickets for £1. Because of this, we go to see late night screenings there together quite often. He's a huge film-buff, he knows everything there is to know about movies. Really an encyclopedic knowledge. Anyway, the only problem with this particular cinema is it's located in a very expensive part of the city. We generally go get some food before seeing a movie, and we always end up spending too much. After years of doing this, Yung Si found a Thai place nearby that actually has reasonable prices. So we went there before the movie, for the first time.

The food was delicious, the portion sizes were generous, and I was happy to, for the first time on a night like this, exit a restaurant not feeling like I had been ripped off. I don't eat Thai food very often. I ordered Pad Kee Mao, and it was excellent. The only complaint I have is, the menu showed an indicator of 3 chilli peppers next to it, the maximum spice rating on the system it was using. When I placed my order, the waitress confirmed with me that I was ok with it being spicy. I love spicy food, pretty much every meal I eat I put spice in it, so I was looking forward to this aspect. Unfortunately, the dish really wasn't very spicy at all. There was some level of kick to it don't get me wrong, but not as much as I would have preferred. Next time we go to that restaurant, I will make sure to tell the staff, "I want it spicy spicy, not white people spicy". But that didn't really take away from my enjoyment as I said, the meal was great.

We still had an hour to kill before the film started, so we went to pick up a few cans. Yung Si doesn't like the taste of beer, so we went with cider instead. We sat on a bench near the cinema and chatted while drinking. We were talking about how 2007 was a great year for movies, music, and anime. At some point I started trying to explain the history of the Nanoha franchise to him, when a scruffy looking man appeared and sat down uncomfortably close to us on the bench.

This man was mumbling and slurring his words, holding a plastic bag which I could see was full of cheap cans of Tesco brand alcohol. My speech processing isn't that great on a good day, so I have no chance in a situation like this. From what I could make out, he was describing a time when he had seen The Prodigy live at some point. Since we had taken our time walking, and perhaps overestimated our drinking ability, we had to drink our cans quickly. As such, I was becoming a bit buzzed.

The scruffy looking man then began to tell a story that went like this:

"Before the war-"

I interrupt,

"Which war?"

"world war 2", he replies, then goes on, "Before the war, Hitler sent twelve women to England."

I asked, "why did he do that?"

He responded, "To work the printing press. One of those twelve women? My mother."

"So your mum was Hitler's top guy?" I quipped, getting a rise out of Yung Si.

"Well I wouldn't say she was his 'top guy'..." the scruffy looking man said.

It was getting close to the time the film was about to start, so I got up and gave the rest of my unfinished can of cider to the scruffy looking man (he had previously asked that I give it to him if I wasn't going to finish it), then we headed in.

I was going in blind to this movie, not looking up any plot information. All I knew was what Si had told me, that it was some sort of neo-noir detective thing. I was not prepared for what Cure turned out to be.

I wouldn't call myself a cinephile or anything like that, but I've seen my fair share of movies. I think Cure definitely stands among the darkest I've ever experienced. The thing is, if I were to describe the events of the film to you here, that wouldn't do justice to the sense that this movie gives you. The horror and intensity comes from the cinematography, music (or lack thereof), and most of all, the editing. It's a deeply nihilistic film, there is no real rhyme or reason to the killings which take place, and there are repeated comments made by the psychologist character regarding how no one really knows why criminals do things. Once killer, when asked why he slashed his victim's arteries, responds that "it just felt like the natural thing to do." Cure is a movie about people who commit horrific murders under hypnotic suggestion. They don't know why they have enacted these killings, as far as they are concerned they have just decided for some reason which they can't remember, to move their hand in a particular "X" shaped pattern. The man behind the hypnosis is quite literally an empty vessel. He has some sort of self-induced amnesia, he doesn't seem to form any new memories, and therefore has no identity. His existence completely interrupts the machine of interrogation.

What's particularly effecting is the way in which the movie somehow hypnotizes you too. Or makes you feel as if you are in danger of being hypnotized, just like the detectives on the case. There are a lot of tracking shots, out of focus moving lights in the background, scenes in dark settings which go on for too long, forcing you to lean in and gaze deep, just to figure out what you're looking at. By the end, both the audience and the main character are unable to tell the difference between delusional vision and reality. What the film shows you versus what the film very deliberately does not show you, gaps in your memory. Pure genius examples of how to break the rules of momentary editing effectively. Something as simple as characters having moved just a little bit too far between cuts. It's a movie that plays with memory in an extremely effective way. At the heart it's not about humans killing each other in the sense that they're committing crimes, it's about an unstoppable force-of-nature which manipulates memories, disconnects them from their regular functioning in such a way that it completely breaks down relations. A virus which re-codes the human memory system, interrupting the process of identification and leaving behind only physical processes abstracted entirely from their social context. I read the movie as regarding deep alienation as a mnemonic or counter-mnemonic process. The entire presentation is so matter-of-fact, somehow both sterile and intimate. I can't describe it accurately in words. Something about it successfully places you in a state where shooting another person in the head becomes abstracted into just moving certain finger muscles in a certain way "何となく" and nothing more. The inhuman terror of "何となく".

After the screening was over, I then had to take the bus home at midnight alone in my mesmerised state. When I fell asleep I had a vivid dream in which I was stabbed repeatedly in the shoulder by someone I know.