Creepy

The title of Creepy (Kuripi Itsuwai no Rinjin) the new shocker by veteran horror maestro Kurosawa Kiyoshi sounds like an in-jokey self-parody. It would be like calling a new Adam Sandler comedy Goofy (or if you not feeling charitable, Crappy).

But the title of the film, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, is also the title of the Maekawa Yutaka novel on which it’s based. And despite his well-deserved reputation for raising audience goose pimples, Kurosawa has made well-received straight dramas, including the 2008 Tokyo Sonata, a Cannes Un Certain Regard prize winner. But this dark film about family disintegration also had surreal passages that were… creepy, if you will.

So does the new film, though it begins as a standard-enough drama about a cop in crisis. Takakura (Nishijima Hidetoshi), a detective trained in criminal psychology, resigns from the force after his attempt to talk a dangerous suspect into surrendering goes disastrously wrong. He becomes a university lecturer and, with the aid of his understanding wife Yasuko (Takeuchi Yuko), starts to get his life back on track.

But once a cop, always a cop. When a former colleague (Higashide Masahiro), comes to him with a six-year-old missing family case, Takakura can’t help investigating, which leads him to the left-behind daughter Saki (Kawaguchi Haruna), then a child, now a still-traumatized young woman.

Meanwhile, Yasuko is becoming all-too-well acquainted with their odd new next-door neighbor, Nishino (Kagawa Teruyuki), who swings unpredictably between meek obsequiousness and menacing verbal aggression. What, Takakura wonders, is the problem with this guy, besides his troubled teenaged daughter and his never-seen depressive wife?
 
Kurosawa, who co-wrote the script with Ikeda Chihiro, takes his time tying these story strands together, until the film starts to feel more like atmospherics than action. But what atmospherics! Going back to The Cure (Kua), his 1997 international break-through, Kurosawa has used everyday phenomena – a breeze through untended bushes, sunlight flickering into a mildewed room – to create unease and dread. And so he does again in Creepy.

But he has also filmed scenes of an over-wrought Takakura interrogating an uncooperative Saki as students at his college silently mill about in the background, behind the blinds of picture windows. The effect is at once natural (the students are doing nothing out of the ordinary) and uncanny (their silence and distance and the filtered white-ish light make them seem ghostly). Also, the cop movie scenes unfolding in a somehow otherworldly setting intensifies the queasy feeling that something wrong is going on.