Creepy (2016) Menacing, and gives the bird to decades of police procedural (Review)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is no stranger to 2016, already his previous film, Journey to the Shore, saw release on Masters of Cinema and that charming albeit misunderstood film took a fascinating posture on saying goodbye. His second film of the year debuted during the London Film festival and, of the two, it has courted far more attention, for better or worse. Kurosawa returns to the branches of cinema that saw him acquire currency for reasons beyond his namesake. Creepy sees him return to the tonally ambiguous horror he previously helmed in his 1997’s masterpiece, Cure.

Hidetoshi Nishijima is Takakura, and as the film starts, he is a distinguished detective taking part in an interrogation with a frighteningly young psychopath trying to carve his name in legend through serial murders. That backfires catastrophically whereby an innocent bystander is murdered, Takakura is stabbed, and the young murderer is shot dead. Months later, Takakura has moved to the country with his wife, Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi), to take up his new career as a criminal psychology lecturer. In this new life, the former police officer instigates a research project that asks why a simple case of missing people was recorded as a crime. Meanwhile, Yasuko is dealing with a severely anti-social neighbour, Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa).

Creepy is a perfectly descriptive title: an adjective that describes a myriad of characters, sets, scenes, and developments. With the aid of red herrings and developing the ambiguity of its titular statement, the film becomes profoundly tense. One scene sees Takakura, along with the help of one of his former police colleagues, question the young girl left behind from the missing family. A simple enough scene where the more obsessed Takakura becomes, the darker the lighting becomes. The subtlety of playing with something as basic as the light changes the meaning of a scene. Is he the titular creepy character? It’s patently obvious that Kurosawa is having a field day sowing discomfort and throwing red herrings around like a fishmonger on a market day.

Naturalism is a key to the work of Japanese genre stalwarts, but few do it as well as Kurosawa; the higher the stakes, the more nail-biting his film becomes. Yet completely upending that is the counter-intuitiveness, where the peaks are not of chaos and mania but silent exchanges or hideous, terrifyingly unpredictable edge of the seat tension. Hinted at early on through the quietness of his direction, Kurosawa makes something as mundane as a neighbour taking a while to answer the door unbearably tense. That scene is in the first 20 minutes, and it only gets worse therein, making good on his neighbour’s initial spikey attitude. High intensity and slow pacing should be unworkable, but thanks to the brilliance of its central trio – no such doubts cross the mind.

Creepy concerns itself with the systematic destruction of the Japanese family, at the top of this hierarchical destruction, is Teruyuki Kagawa as Nishino – the actor, more known for his work on TV, is brilliant bouncing around his house of mirrors performance. Is he nice? Is he anti-social? He is all these things and more. Not putting too much credit on his shoulders, but he is the linchpin that makes the film such a resounding and terrifying success. His manipulations keep you guessing until deep in the third act.

The investigative arm of police fiction has had near uncountable films, TV shows, and books made representing it in many different, if fundamentally analogous, ways that many have built up a cultural expectation for what should be done and how. Kurosawa, however, is much more complex in his rules and shading; the core of these expectations is that something concerned with police fiction has to obey conventional logic. It’s for this very reason that there has been a backlash against Kurosawa’s Creepy on the festival circuit, as it gives the bird to conventions from the word go.

Reality is more convoluted than detective shows on TV. Crime and violence don’t obey norms, on the contrary, they are often of convenience, irregularity or even nonsense, and those victims may be on the wrong end of little more than bad luck. The very core of Kurosawa’s return to genre cinema has one almighty case of contrivance at its core which will alienate many and have even more state outright that the characters are stupid. Think that all you want, Kurosawa is playing a much longer game than may seem the case at first glance. Look at the grander picture and you’ll find one of Japanese cinema’s finest names at the top of his game. Creepy is a film that’ll wear the fabric out of the edge of any seat that is prepared to engage with it on its terms. Kurosawa is depicting how the chaos of crime and life intersect, something beyond the rules of conventional, formulaic, structured mystery fiction.

Thanks for reading our review of Creepy

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