Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Written by Chihiro Ikeda and Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy is a tar pit, an opaque mass into which you wade and soon realize you’re no longer in control as it drags you down into its story of a retired police detective who’s asked to help out with a missing person’s case and begins to suspect his neighbour who, to be fair, is really odd.
It’s another misanthropic outing from the man behind the masterpiece Cure: happenings are deeply troubling, answers are elusive, their progenitor seemingly omnipotent, but Creepy doesn’t hit the same heights (gut-squelching lows, rather) because it won’t commit to the mystery, just the misery.
We begin mid-interrogation, as Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) sits with an accused killer. A textbook psychopath, Takakura says with fascination, eager to continue to “solve” him. It ends in bloody disaster, and a year later Takakura has retired, moved, and taken up work teaching students criminal psychology, telling them that many of society’s worst murderers don’t follow a pattern we can deduce and track to their capture. A lapsed believer.
Nonetheless, he’s drawn into an unsolved investigation into three people who simply disappeared, and while it’s not considered a murder case on paper, Takakura has one look at the house wherein it happened, and already senses it’s a crime scene.
It’s slow going because the only witness suffers from horrible amnesia, and Takakura grows increasingly desperate to wring any semblance of a clue from her, his angst aggravated by the dealings with his neighbour Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa), an unnerving acquaintance who runs hot and cold, and whose identity Takakura has every doubt about.
Creepy isn’t a slow burn, it’s an increasingly cold mist that turns to ice before everything shatters at the climax. Takakura’s investigation’s a fumble in the dark, and at home, his wife Yasuko’s odd encounters with Nishino are unsettling, but not much more. You wait and wait for Creepy to reveal its hand, or at least lay down a card, but Kurosawa tests your patience.
While he’s great at building this overwhelming ominous feeling that curdles into despair, Kurosawa doesn’t perform the same alchemy here as he did with Cure, and that’s because Creepy is ultimately earthbound, and its monsters not enmeshed in us.
Creepy is more a visceral jolt than a cerebral torture. Kurosawa shows his hand often to guide things along, and true terror requires hopelessness. Without it, villainy and its hijinks going unpunished becomes frustrating, and that’s the case with Creepy, which doesn’t give us real people to rally behind – they’re all just a bit too stupid, demoted to stopgaps to keep the plot moving along.
Not a stopgap, but a tentpole: As Nishino, Teruyuki Kagawa is a sensation. With his iguana eyes that he turns to slits in antagonism or glazed orbs in deference, Kagawa’s performance as the neighbour you’d hate to have is special, a piece of shadowboxing where Kagawa toys with your perception of him throughout. A true shape shifting performance that doesn’t let up. He’s the show of Kurosawa’s movie.
Creepy can ultimately fit in a very small space, not dousing you in dread, but offering only some moments of shock, surprise, and the feeling that some murder mysteries definitely only exist in the movies.
Mikkel Frederiksen 