Kritiken

Creepy is among Kurosawa's most ingeniously constructed contraptions.

It could have fallen into the conventions of the standard thriller, but Kurosawa transcends the premise by rejecting psychological realism. Driven by irrationality, the movie ends up connecting its dots, both narratively and conceptually, through the recurrent high-angle shot of a blind alley—society as a mouse-trap—as Kurosawa disposes of the fallacy of social peace by obliterating the notion of narrative logic.

That Creepy comes so close to being a standard police procedural/boogeyman narrative makes its grace notes all the more striking. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa uses genre trappings as window dressing—basically, as a vehicle to get to the uncanny.

The second-best Kurosawa returns to horror with an initially convoluted-seeming tale that turns out to be as simple, and grim, as death. The surreal touches are genuinely unnerving and the ending is one of the most satisfying, in a movie-movie way, I've experienced in quite some time.

The film has a cold preciseness that stands in contrast to the director's previous feature Journey to the Shore... No such levity can be found here. Menacing camera movements help track characters through rooms, sometimes anticipating their location before they even arrive. Kurosawa's experimental lighting also adds another psychological dimension, as is the case with a brilliant interrogation scene that echoes one found late in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows.

Kurosawa's work of the last six years was not necessarily lacking in shadows and light (a trait he shares with Hooper, along with another acknowledged influence, Mario Bava) nor has any of his work been without a certain romanticism; it's just that what is on display here is a welcome return to the terrain of a consummate professional operating on a level of complete control, with a style steeped in classicism, accompanied by ideas teeming with the possibilities of the modern.

The movie is full of lures, snares and ambushes, as befits a suspense movie, but what sets it apart from the average run of thrillers is how willingly its characters walk into them. The destination may be inevitable, but the trip there is never less than compelling, thanks in no small part to Kurosawa's awareness of the widescreen frame and his tensile wielding of classical mise en scène, which is about as easy to find today as good blacksmithing.

Kurosawa remains one of few filmmakers who can make broad daylight as scary as pitch darkness. (Although keep in mind that when the lights go out in his films things will always be even more terrifying.) Creepy is just as the title suggests, and much beyond that. Most meaningfully, it's a reminder of the frightening things that can happen when we don't talk to the ones we love.

Kurosawa's sense of emphasis is inverted: What other filmmakers do with close-ups or shadows, he does with wide shots, ellipses, and empty space. And the more successfully Creepy rationalizes itself, the more irrational it becomes, until it descends into one of those decrepit subterranean spaces that have stood in for the recesses of the psyche in Kurosawa's movies.

In terms of formal orchestration, Creepy is as sublime as any prior Kurosawa film. But the filmmaker, whose use of silence is as masterful as his blocking, doesn't fully mine his promising theme.

What matters is how Kurosawa mines the divide between family and work, and questions the limits of love and knowledge. Don't expect answers. Instead, consider the extraordinary moment when an overhead camera pulls back from two men until they're near specks, as if they were being cut down to existential size. Kurosawa doesn't explain the shot or tether it to an obvious point of view. Instead, he just holds on it, inviting you to fill it with meaning or simply ponder the ineffable with dread.

What's the opposite of a jump scare? Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has mastered it in the superb Creepy, revealing the upsetting details with such slow-build subtlety that you don't notice your skin crawling until it's halfway out the door.