Cure

Will Menaker5.0

"I was once full, but what was inside me is outside now,” A former psychology student obsessed with mesmerism, turned amnesiac gets a series of totally normal and sane people to commit murder simply by confounding them by not answering their questions, talking in circles, smoking a cigarette and asking them "who are you? Tell me about yourself." If this was just a movie about serial murder via hypnotism it wouldn't be one of my all time favorites, but Kurosawa does something far creepier and harder to get a handle on: an epidemiological portrait of the howling void at the center of an entire society and the cauldron of violence simmering beneath the veneer of a compliant politeness. Has one of my favorite last shots in any movie ever.

Branson Reese

Early on you’re like “I would never fall for this shit. I would somehow resist it” and then you’re glued to the scene where he spills the water in the doctor’s office and you’re like “ah shit he’d get me in a second. I’d probably even try to squeeze in a second kill before I got caught.”

Neil Bahadur5.0

A work almost too disquieting: Procedural pushed to obsession pushed to psychosis. Starts as a seeming vision of 90's Tokyo as a city of corpses and interrogation rooms, but even as it does work on sociological levels, (similar to Pulse, Kurosawa uses genre trappings to have us reflect on present spaces and objects) it's a film of the psyche first and foremost. I can't think of a movie that feels more scarring. Even reflections on voyeurism & cinema: by desiring to understand evil we risk getting to close to it, and if we get too close to evil we will become evil. Even as we travese physical spaces we enter psychological ones, like Mamiya's cell or the abandoned house. And when these spaces intercut, even a cup of water is terrifying.