Shochiku. Lavish production values. First of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s late masterpieces. There’s always been something about the police procedural genre of movies that has this familiar cozy nostalgic inviting intellectual sensation of relaxed paced learning where the journey is the reward as much as if not more than the outcome.
Creepy (2016, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) is a studio movie. Wall to wall emotional underscoring emphasizes the suspense cuing us when and how to respond. Instantly and thoroughly accessible engaging. Broad. Unabashedly crowd pleasing. Until it isn’t.
The procedural makes detectives of us all. At that house in Hino City who were those five bodies? Or for that matter this might be obnoxious of me to ask but if they were vacuum sealed in those body bags why does NOGAMI have that repulsive retch smell reaction in the house? It’s the three Hondas and two Mizutas right? No these questions aren’t important. Aren’t as compelling as.
What hold does NISHINO have over MIO? When he gives her Nogami’s gun we notice how she doesn’t for a second seem to consider using it on him. How does she still go to school every day? Why wasn’t SAKI HONDA susceptible to Nishino’s influence even though the rest of her family was? How was she allowed to live? What does she remember?
Before I get any further it’s worth mentioning that Creepy isn’t grounded in the verisimilitude of what we might call the real world nor is its logic what we might call accessible. It’s cinematic which is better. Embrace artifice and you won’t be disappointed. The ways the lives of Mio Saki YASUKO and TAKAKURA are affected is what’s relevant here.
Nishino is the embodiment of Evil. He only wears black. He only gets others to enact his heinous crimes. Although never called heroin by name he uses so called shots to enslave his victims. This figure through cinema is a symbol of the psychological anomaly in society that makes men evil.
But the big twist thematic conceit of the film is what does pure evil really want? To have his own happy family. To live right next door to you. To have the perfect little life we all want. And that’s what’s so scary. Antisocial Personality Disorder psychopath doesn’t fit the profile categories of motives patterns or continuity because he wants to be just like you.
As trad as Creepy starts off the second half and into the final act the façade shatters. Just like Nishino. And it will be because he pushes it too far. Just as the narrative does. The narrative transgresses by pushing us too far. It operates on our limits until we can’t take anymore either. It doesn’t play fair.
The circumstances under which we may observe Nishino preying upon Yasuko is sublime. There are two key scenes between just she and he where the color is boosted. The greens of the grass and skintones saturated for a brief moment in this otherwise subdued washed out palette. Why? Even the filmmaking techniques are pushed too far.
In closing some movie nerd miscellany. In that trope scene where Nishino and Takagawa see who can get Yasuko to choose between them the cut does this thing I know Kiyoshi Kurosawa does in his later work I have been obsessed with for a while and haven’t spoken with anyone else about or read about in any helpful way but I wanna call it a match reverse.
Specifically a wide where the perspective although it may contain depth is flat in the sense of frontal geometrically even horizontally. So when it cuts to the reverse each of the bodies of the characters are shown in the exact same size of the previous composition and placement in said previous frame. My guess is they have a video playback person put an overlay on the image to achieve this. I don’t know if I’m even properly describing this. But anyways.
Also around the midpoint when Nogami opens that sliding heavy metal door it totally gives The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) iconic vibes. Even more so because like in that movie he enters without being invited in and no one is around. That hypnotic yellow pinwheel fan spinning. If I said it was reminiscent of the Texas tower windmills I’d be pushing it too far.
What hold does NISHINO have over MIO? When he gives her Nogami’s gun we notice how she doesn’t for a second seem to consider using it on him. How does she still go to school every day? Why wasn’t SAKI HONDA susceptible to Nishino’s influence even though the rest of her family was? How was she allowed to live? What does she remember?
Before I get any further it’s worth mentioning that Creepy isn’t grounded in the verisimilitude of what we might call the real world nor is its logic what we might call accessible. It’s cinematic which is better. Embrace artifice and you won’t be disappointed. The ways the lives of Mio Saki YASUKO and TAKAKURA are affected is what’s relevant here.
Nishino is the embodiment of Evil. He only wears black. He only gets others to enact his heinous crimes. Although never called heroin by name he uses so called shots to enslave his victims. This figure through cinema is a symbol of the psychological anomaly in society that makes men evil.
But the big twist thematic conceit of the film is what does pure evil really want? To have his own happy family. To live right next door to you. To have the perfect little life we all want. And that’s what’s so scary. Antisocial Personality Disorder psychopath doesn’t fit the profile categories of motives patterns or continuity because he wants to be just like you.
As trad as Creepy starts off the second half and into the final act the façade shatters. Just like Nishino. And it will be because he pushes it too far. Just as the narrative does. The narrative transgresses by pushing us too far. It operates on our limits until we can’t take anymore either. It doesn’t play fair.
The circumstances under which we may observe Nishino preying upon Yasuko is sublime. There are two key scenes between just she and he where the color is boosted. The greens of the grass and skintones saturated for a brief moment in this otherwise subdued washed out palette. Why? Even the filmmaking techniques are pushed too far.
In closing some movie nerd miscellany. In that trope scene where Nishino and Takagawa see who can get Yasuko to choose between them the cut does this thing I know Kiyoshi Kurosawa does in his later work I have been obsessed with for a while and haven’t spoken with anyone else about or read about in any helpful way but I wanna call it a match reverse.
Specifically a wide where the perspective although it may contain depth is flat in the sense of frontal geometrically even horizontally. So when it cuts to the reverse each of the bodies of the characters are shown in the exact same size of the previous composition and placement in said previous frame. My guess is they have a video playback person put an overlay on the image to achieve this. I don’t know if I’m even properly describing this. But anyways.
Also around the midpoint when Nogami opens that sliding heavy metal door it totally gives The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) iconic vibes. Even more so because like in that movie he enters without being invited in and no one is around. That hypnotic yellow pinwheel fan spinning. If I said it was reminiscent of the Texas tower windmills I’d be pushing it too far.
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