Kurosawa cleverly unfolds his tale as two separate narratives, one entailing Detective Takabe's desperate search for a mastermind behind the serial killings, and the second narrative being a slow introduction to the character of Kunio Mamiya, a hapless drifter with a mysterious connection to the manslaughter's. Mamiya (Hagiwara Masato - pictured at right), is an individual suffering from such severe memory loss that people doubt he's cognizant of his surroundings at all. He has no identity of any kind, and cannot even recognize himself in a mirror or in photographs.

Several grisly murders take place where the victims were known to have had contact with the odd wanderer, and so Mamiya is eventually picked up for questioning by the police. Being in charge of the investigation, detective Takabe interrogates the strange young man and discovers something profoundly disturbing about him. While the amnesiac is as blank as an unsoiled sheet of paper, he possesses an uncanny ability. Just what that power might be I cannot reveal, since much of the excitement one experiences when watching Kurosawa's film comes from unraveling it's multiple layers of mystery. However, I will say this... the figure of Mamiya and his connection to the murder spree is one of the most inventive and original twists ever
presented in a detective film.

What makes CURE such a remarkable thriller is it's unwillingness to provide the audience with a character representing penultimate evil. Instead the viewer is made to examine their own negative impulses, and ponder just what it would take before those impulses leapt to the surface. Kurosawa's premise is that we are all capable of misdeeds, and so his focus is on the "banality of evil." To further throw us into a panic the director plays upon the human frailty of uncertainty concerning self identity, for despite our conspicuous consumption and materialist conceits... we still cannot answer Mamiya's question. We are chilled by the realization that there's a bit of the hapless drifter in every one of us... we are turned inside out by the modern age, we are empty, blank, and living for the moment. Kurosawa is certainly a maverick in presenting this world view.

After the screening Kurosawa took questions from the enthusiastic audience through his excellent translator, who would provide the director's responses to the crowd in English. When asked how he came up with such a startling idea for a detective story, Kurosawa replied that television news reports from murder scenes had provided the inspiration. He noted that such reportage always included interviews with neighbors who would say something inane like: "But he was such a normal fellow." This got the director thinking that perhaps an exploration of 'normalcy' as a mask for depravity might not be such a bad idea for a film. Kurosawa elaborated by saying he could think of few things more genuinely disturbing than people desperately trying to be normal, and he drove home this point by portraying all of the unwitting killers in CURE as upstanding professionals.

Kurosawa also revealed his preference for shooting scenes without having rehearsed them beforehand, stating that this method keeps the actors sharp and reacting to situations realistically. Under his direction, often times a single take is all that's required to finish a scene. Hagiwara Masato, whose brilliant performance brought the Mamiya character to life, was sought out due to his popularity as a television actor. The director wanted him cast as Mamiya in order to "explore the dark side" of an actor who up until this film had always played an open,
friendly, upbeat sort of character.