Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s having a moment, and he seems primed for the build-up to his three-picture release in 2024. It happened in the US in a roundabout way, where the Oscar wins for Parasite (2019) led to Bong Joon-ho’s solidification as one of the great modern Korean directors, and caused an explosion in popularity in his early masterpiece Memories of Murder (2001) in particular. There’re few films like Memories. Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) borrows heavily from it, although plays its serial killer narrative with much more determinism and completely misplaced confidence in its own conclusions—it’s as if Memories of Murder’s ambiguous, gut-wrenching conclusion exists to preemptively counter-argue Fincher’s moronic and form-betraying Zodiac post-script. But the film most like Memories of Murder is the film that Bong cites as its greatest influence: K. Kurosawa’s haunting, hypnotic work of mesmeric evil, Cure (1997).
Cure got a Criterion release in 2022, a year after Memories of Murder, as if American cinephilia was working its way through a previously unseen undercurrent in genre cinema coming out of East Asia. Kurosawa’s aesthetic inclinations were perfect for reclamation in the moment, too. His films are precise and technically proficient, often understated in general approach but with shocking interjections to break the apparent mundanities. Part of the appeal is that there’s no one else quite like Kiyoshi Kurosawa. His architectural mise-en-scene is ostensibly banal with an off-putting quality that feels unspoken, or impossible to speak about. It’s the way that sharp daylight comes through a home’s window in the late morning—it’s like everything’s illuminated, but there’s something sinking under the small shadows.
On Twitter, film critic Daniel Gorman described the horizontal pans in Kurosawa’s Chime (2024) as “always searching for some kind of symmetry or equilibrium but finding instead off-center, unbalanced compositions.” This, I think, pinpoints what makes Kurosawa such a powerful portrayer of everyday settings, and how he acts as an antidote to the perfectionism that’s plagued contemporary cinema. While he has an extraordinary compositional eye, the images he lands on aren’t ones that flash with perfection, but instead slowly pull you in as their off-kilter qualities gradually reveal themselves. One looks at a dining room or a foyer in a Kurosawa movie as if it should be non-threatening, but there’s something off about it, some force creeping just below its surface.
There’s no more perfect location in Kurosawa’s cinema to highlight this than the neighbor's house in Creepy (2016). The strange, unplaceable behavior of someone who lives next door (played with terrifying brilliance by Kurosawa regular Teruyuki Kagawa) is heightened when we first glimpse inside his house. We stand in the seemingly ordinary entryway, when the neighbor disappears into what, architecturally, should be a small room or closet (as right behind it is a parallel hallway), yet when the neighbor fails to return it implies a much deeper bowel to the house than what’s seen from the outside. Once we finally go down into the depths (and no doubt, Bong took influence from this in Parasite as well), there are cobwebbed, concrete-lined hallways stretching to big metal doors, as if the darkest interiors of the domestic space have a half-built and decaying industrial foundation.
These are the spaces that are more immediately terrifying within Kurosawa’s world, they’re the places that people disappear to when society has checked them out. It’s where a disgraced detective finds himself, running from his own failings (Charisma [1998]) or drawn in by the lonely ghosts left behind in the world (Retribution [2006]). Lurking around the corner for the lived-in, built environment is always the disused, the formerly inhabited. The world’s propped up on delicate stilts, falling into disrepair out of the corner of our eyes and ready to have the floor drop out into oblivion.
Another aspect that makes Kurosawa’s films hard to grasp for western audiences is how his films tend to be just as unplaceable as the strangeness within his ordinary settings. His penchant for fantastical rear-projections in car rides or narratives where the Earth really does shatter seems to betray the otherwise “realistic” appearance of his images. But it’s also why the horror of his films is constant, regardless of genre—the cerebral always becomes the real, what lies in the deepest folds of the brain can manifest itself on the landscape.
This creates tonal shifts beyond just Kurosawa’s genre fluidity, where the feel of the film follows an emotional logic that transcends the confines of convention within which the film was commissioned. This, I’d argue, comes out too from Kurosawa working within a studio system in Japan that can still be described as industrious. Where Hollywood has shifted from a factory town to a mask for speculative finance, Japan’s system still resembles its 20th-century style of productivity. The emotional logic that Kurosawa employs wouldn’t be out of place in Classic Hollywood—one could see the same tonal shift from everydayness to surrealism masquerading as a gangster picture in Kurosawa’s Eyes of the Spider (1998) as in the Peter Lorre film The Face Behind the Mask (1941) (the productive capacity of Japanese cinema is also evidenced by how Kurosawa was able to put up Old Hollywood numbers last year). The overall narrative drive can make his films hard to explain, and it’s been near impossible to recount the plot of Charisma or why I love the ending of Pulse without sounding like the films are completely ridiculous. Yet they work, maybe in a way where they only can because they’re films, where Kurosawa’s hand can gently nudge against the doldrums of our banal routines and show us, in broad daylight, what’s actually at play under the surface of it all.