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.

-Brandon Ledet