Creepy (2016)
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
After having narrowly escaped an attempt on his life at the hands of a psychopath, detective inspector Takakura quits active service in the police force and takes up a position as a university lecturer in criminal psychology. But his desire to get to the bottom of criminals’ motives remains, and he does not hesitate long when former colleague Nogami asks him to reopen an old case.
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13 films that influenced Creepy
What critics say influenced Creepy
We have the theme of the neighbour under suspicion that underlies Rear Window; and the family member who isn’t what he appears to reflect Joseph Cotton’s Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt.
We have the theme of the neighbour under suspicion that underlies Rear Window; and the family member who isn’t what he appears to reflect Joseph Cotton’s Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt.
There’s a hint of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in Kurosawa’s approach to his material, with the swooping camera work and eerie, orchestral score.
His wife, Yasuko (Yûko Takeuchi, "Ringu"), is anxious to make friends with the neighbors, but Mrs. Tanaka says she and her moaning, bedridden mother 'don't associate with people around here.'
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa made a splash in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when U.S. audiences were introduced to J-horror by movies like Hideo Nakata's influential Ringu.
Like the former, he draws on a fascination with evil (one can imagine Lang’s masterpieces M and The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse remade as Kurosawa movies), and like the latter, he merges the macabre and the everyday in a way that unsettles feelings about both.
In its final section, the film begins to resemble one of those gruesome shockers that Takashi Miike used to make in the late 1990s, for example, Audition.
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Not since “Bad Boy Bubby” has plastic wrap been put to such scary use on screen as it is in “Creepy,” Kiyoshi Kurosawa ’s nail-biting thriller dominated by a psychopath who exerts a malevolent hold on his neighbors.
Like most notorious “hunt for a serial lunatic” films, from Seven to The Silence of the Lambs, Creepy maps out the intersection where good intentions and naive moralizing collide with pure evil, though this description suggests a movie of much greater velocity.
Ostensibly a sleek investigative thriller, Creepy later takes a detour into macabre and surreal territory, returning to the outré register of Kurosawa films such as Pulse and Charisma, following his recent, gently emotive take on the supernatural, Journey to the Shore.
As he did in his 1997 international breakthrough “The Cure” (“Kua”) and many films since, Kurosawa uses everyday phenomena — a breeze through untended bushes, sunlight flickering into a mildewed room — to stir feelings of unease and dread.
As with Kurosawa’s brilliant “Cure,” “Pulse” and “Seance,” “Creepy” uses silence as a tool of terror, following its characters through long, tense scenes where everything’s a little too quiet, and where each creak sounds like a scream.
Teruyuki Kagawa – who also starred in Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, 2008 – steals the show with a relishably eccentric performance as the nervy and unnerving Nishino.
And despite his well-deserved reputation for raising goose pimples, Kurosawa has also made well-received straight dramas, including the 2008 “Tokyo Sonata,” a dark film about family disintegration that won the Cannes Un Certain Regard section Jury Prize.
The house in between the Takakuras and the Tanakas appears to be under constant construction and when Yasuko meets its owner, Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa, "Tokyo!," "Tokyo Sonata"), she tells her husband he is "Creepy."
The only exception is Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa, “Penance,” “Tokyo Sonata”) from the secluded house next door.
A character actor who also impressed in Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008) and Penance (2012), Kagawa nails the role of the mysterious neighbour who shows spontaneous bursts of hostility and no conceivable social skills.
Kagawa, who starred in Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata as a white-collar family man with a very different type of secret, is a marvel to watch; when Nishino and Takakura run into each other on a commuter train, he gives a grimacing courtesy smile that falls somewhere in the uncanny valley.
Produciton designer Norifumi Ataka (“Norwegian Wood,” Kurosawa’s “The Seventh Code”) captures Tokyo suburban life with impressive verisimilitude, and with dirt and ugliness unceremoniously accumulating around the corners.