In the 2000s, Kiyoshi Kurosawa captured the sinister liminality of the early Internet in his online ghost story Pulse. Two decades later, Kurosawa’s Cloud meets the Internet where it currently is in the 2020s: crassly capitalistic and decidedly non-mysterious. Instead of promising a new digital frontier where humanity can diverge from its corporeal form into something new & vaguely defined (and, thus, horrific), the Internet is now just another point of sale for banal, capitalist trade. It’s all empty opportunism as far as the mouse can click, leaving us selfish, isolated, and misanthropic in a competitive market of products instead of ideas. As a result, Kurosawa’s latest rumination on the Nature of the Internet is flatter & hollower that it is imaginative or atmospheric, but the implications of what living online has done to our souls are just as scary as they were in the temporal snapshot of aughts-era online culture in Pulse.
Premiering locally at the horror-leaning Overlook Film Festival, Cloud asksatruly scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? It turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic. Masaki Suda stars as a shameless online retailer who buys limited-supply products at wholesale prices en masse to deplete supplies so that he can resell them to desperate buyers at extortionist prices. Think of the pricks who force concerts to immediately, artificially sell out on Ticketmaster for personal profit, and you get the gist. It’s easy to screw his buyers over from the safety of online anonymity, but things turn violent when those buyers band together to get revenge on him in the meat space — threatening to live-stream his torture as retribution for his crimes. Only, even that vigilante organization has been disjointed by the selfishness of online culture, causing them to squabble & fall apart instead of acting as a collective. Deadly slapstick violence ensues.
The flat, digital cinematography of Cloud, combined with the slow escalation of its daylit absurdism, is more reminiscent of Kurosawa’s sci-fi satire Doppelganger than something as moody & menacing as Pulse. As with several other Kurosawa stories, it all culminates in a warehouse shootout, leaving practically everyone dead on the concrete as victims of capitalist violence. It isn’t until Kurosawa pushes past that banal, real-world violence into something more immensely, supernaturally evil in the final coda that the entire picture comes together. Cloud is a slow build to a loud, buffoonish conclusion, followed by a moment of “What have we become?” existential crisis. It’s the kind of movie that only becomes more thematically complex & darkly hilarious the longer you dwell on it after the credits roll. Some of that dwelling is extratextual too, given that its current festival-circuit rollout has been compromised by the film being leaked in its entirety via a Twitter link for brief online clout — the exact kind of selfish, misanthropic behavior that the film satirizes.
New Orleans is currently enjoying the best repertory cinema programming it’s had in my lifetime. I may have missed the healthy art-cinema scene that was obliterated by the arrival of the AMC “Palace” multiplexes in the city’s suburbs in the 1990s, but something beautiful & exciting has sprouted from that rubble in the 2020s. Looking back at the older movies we’ve covered on the blog over the past ten years because they happened to be screening locally, it’s immediately clear that local programmers are getting more adventurous & esoteric in their tastes. It used to be that you could only catch rep screenings of Hitchcock classics like To Catch a Thief & Strangers on a Train on Sunday mornings at The Prytania’s ongoing Classic Movies series. Now every Wednesday night is a head-to-head battle to see who can screen the hipper, edgier title between the Gap Tooth Cinema series at The Broad (formerly known as Wildwood) and the Prytania Cinema Club at Canal Place (former host of Wildwood). That competitive battle has resulted in a robust local slate including hard-to-see titles like Entertaining Mr. Sloane, On the Silver Globe, and Coonskin as well as celebratory screenings of true cult classics like Pink Flamingos, Blue Velvet, and House. And that’s not including the one-off barroom & coffee shop screenings and the week-long restoration runs of other weirdo classics around town. The New Orleans repertory scene is still nowhere near matching the behemoth breadth of a New York, a Los Angeles, or even an Austin, but it’s at least better now than it was when we first started this blog ten years ago, and you can clearly see that progress charted on this Letterboxd list of what we’ve been able to cover because of it.
According to that list, the 100th local repertory screening I’ve attended in the first ten years of Swampflix was the hypnotic Japanese horror film Cure, thanks to the aforementioned Prytania Cinema Club. An early calling card film for the still-working, still-thriving Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cure arrived during the serial killer thriller era of the post-Silence of the Lambs 1990s. Kōji Yakusho stars as a Tokyo police detective working to connect a series of vicious murders in which victims’ throats are slashed in the same meticulous “X” pattern but were executed by different killers, found dazed at the scene of the crime. The common link between these parallel domestic killings is an amnesiac drifter and former psychology student played by Masato Hagiwara, who appears to be weaponizing an old-fashioned form of Mesmerism to incite the murders. While the detective struggles to pin these surrogate acts of violence on a man who can barely remember information told to him earlier in a single conversation, let alone his own life story or name, the mesmerism starts to infect the cop’s intrusive thoughts, interrupting the normal flow of a serial killer movie. His mentally ill wife mutates from a patient in his care to the obvious next victim in the hypnosis-induced murder spree, and all he can really do to stop it is to feebly threaten violence against a dazed, checked-out slacker who only offers middle-distance stares and vague philosophical questions in response. It’s a horror movie about an infectious idea, which is always a creepier enemy to fight against since there can be no physical, decisive victory. Attempts to diminish or punish the killer mesmerist only bring him into the presence of even more dangerous men higher up the law-enforcement food chain, spreading the threat instead of squashing it.
I loved getting the chance to see Cure for the first time in a proper theater, fully submerged in its eerie, icy mood without the trivial distractions of home viewing. It’s the kind of movie that asks you to pay attention to the roaring hums of machines—fluorescent lights, car engines, washing machines, ocean tide—and the jarring silence of their sudden absence. The blink-and-miss-them flashes of the unreliable detective-protagonist’s hypnotic visions of his own domestic violence could easily be missed with a cell phone or a house pet or passing traffic competing for your momentary attention at home. It’s an extraordinarily creepy film but also a subtle one. At the same time, it made me question whether this entire enterprise of lauding repertory programming can be detrimental to the way we watch and think about contemporary releases. At least, I left Cure a little skeptical about why so many movie nerds are willing to give into the pure-evil vibes of vintage Japanese horrors like this, Suicide Club, and Perfect Blue but get hung up on the supposed plot incoherence of their modern American equivalent in Longlegs. All four of those works warp the familiar beats of the traditional serial killer thriller into new, grotesque configurations by dredging up the supernatural menace lurking just under the genre’s real-world surface. Only Longlegs hasn’t had the benefit of multiple decades of critical analysis and cultural context lending additional meaning & significance to the events of its supernatural plot, so that discerning cinephile audiences get tripped up on whether its story makes practical sense instead of focusing on what really matters: its atmospheric sense, its evil vibes. Cure has long since let go of that baggage. It’s been canonized as a great work, so its ambiguity is taken as an asset instead of an oversight.
What I’m really celebrating here is the gift of access. To date, I had only seen one other Kurosawa film: his atypical sci-fi comedy-thriller Doppelgänger, which has largely been forgotten as a lesser work. That film’s DVD just happened to fall into my lap at my local Goodwill, which is how I find a lot of older movies outside the taste-making curation of streamers like The Criterion Channel, Mubi, and Tubi. Having that curation spill out of my living room and into proper cinemas in recent years has been a wonderful, welcome change of pace. I might’ve kept Cure on the watchlist backburner for another decade or two if it weren’t screening a couple bus stops away from my office cubicle. I also likely would have missed one of its eerie, intrusive flashes of violence had I watched it alone at home, where I’m always one phone notification away from zapping a movie of all its sensory magic. I hope The Prytania Cinema Club and Gap Tooth Cinema keep competing for my patronage every Wednesday into eternity to keep that magic alive. Or, better yet, I hope one of them gives up their Wednesday slot for a different night so I don’t have to make an either/or choice every week. I missed a screening of the Rowlands-Cassavetes collab Opening Night so I could finally check out Cure instead, even though it would have been a lovely way to commemorate the recent passing of an all-timer of a powerhouse actor. Having that either/or choice is a privilege that I didn’t have just a few years ago, when the majority of local rep screenings were our weekly Sunday morning visits with Rene Brunet.
There’s something bittersweet about the early-2000s boom of Japanese & Korean horror films that were imported to the United States through home video labels like Tartan Asia Extreme. On the one hand, it’s wonderful that daring, genre-blurring films like Suicide Club & A Tale of Two Sisters were able to find an audience outside of their respective home countries. On the other hand, those films’ American marketing often perpetuated a reductive, borderline-Orientalist perception of that era in East Asian genre filmmaking as the most “extreme, “fucked-up”, “incredibly strange” movies ever made – as if every film were a variation on the torturous Guinea Pig series. It was a very profitable perception for Tartan, I bet, but I’m not convinced it was an entirely healthy one for the filmmakers they were platforming (not to mention other filmmakers from the region who were working in entirely different modes of cinematic storytelling at the time). I don’t want to complain too much about the way those home video releases were marketed to Americans, though, since those vintage DVD scans are still the only commercially available copies of a lot of those films in the US two decades later. At least they found a path to our eyeballs, imperfect as it was.
I wonder how much the commercial pressures of “extreme J-horror” marketability influenced the production of the 2003 sci-fi comedy Doppelgänger. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa earned international acclaim among genre fans making that exact kind of Ringu-era J-horror exports (Cure, Pulse, Seance, etc.), but with Doppelgänger you can feel him striving to branch out into other modes of storytelling. He sets the film up as a J-horror update to Jekyll & Hyde in its first act (which landed it an American DVD release on the Tartan Asia Extreme label), but it’s a much sillier film than that early tone implies. Doppelgänger delivers the vicious violence that contemporary American audiences had come to expect from “extreme” Japanese horror cinema, but the further it goes along the more it strays into broad slapstick comedy, gradually escalating to ZAZ-level buffoonery in its final act (including an Indiana Jones spoof involving a boulder-sized disco ball). It’s a darkly funny film, where most of the punchlines are people’s skulls being cracked with the anticlimactic thud of a hammer. Still, it feels like Kurosawa only establishes an eerie sci-fi mood in the opening stretch so he could get away with goofing off once all the usual J-horror boxes were checked.
One reason it’s so tempting to speculate about Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s frustrations with market expectations is that the protagonist of Doppelgänger is also intensely frustrated by his corporate overlords. Kōji Yakusho stars as a meek research scientist who’s developing a kind of mech-suit wheelchair for the physically disabled, providing mechanical arms for paralytics. The profit-obsessed higher-ups at his lab’s parent company continually undermine his careful research, forcing him to conform to unrealistic deadlines that threaten to corrupt the project. This immense corporate pressure coincides with the arrival of the scientist’s doppelgänger (also played by Kōji Yakusho), whose brash, macho confidence creates an exponentially violent competition with the kinder, original scientist. This is the story of a creative genius driven insane by small-minded money men, eventually abandoning his scientific pursuits altogether to instead engage in a pointless war with his own psyche. It concludes with a go-nowhere road trip into total delirium, chasing down a deliberately pointless flavor of comedic absurdism rarely seen outside a Quentin Dupieux film. By the end, Kurosawa is basically just goofing off, whether or not horror-hungry audiences were still along for the ride.
Two decades after its initial release, the biggest hurdle to enjoying Doppelgänger isn’t so much its reluctance to deliver the “extreme” J-horror goods; it’s the film’s early-2000s digi cinematography, which makes it look like cheap TV instead of proper cinema. Even when it’s playing with spooky sci-fi ideas in its early stretch, the film lacks any of the throat-hold atmospheric dread that makes Kurosawa’s actual horror films so intense. That disinterest in establishing an eerie mood is only amplified by the outdated SD scans of the film that are available on DVD & streaming services, to the point where even its indulgences in De Palma-style split screens feel like music video fuckery instead of genuine experiments in form. All that flatness in tone stops mattering once the film reveals its true nature as a farcical comedy, though, starting with the macho doppelgänger copying his source-human’s café order one table over just to fuck with him and quickly escalating to a series of deadpan murders with a hastily wielded hammer. I could see a lot of Western audiences having the exact opposite experience in the aughts, though, popping in a Tartan Asia Extreme DVD and enjoying the early spooky goings-on, only to be baffled by the goofball pranks that followed.
Swampflix 