Creepy

Like most Kiyoshi Kurosawa films, Creepy burns slow as asbestos, with similarly poisonous possibilities. The Japanese auteur once more drags horror from the backwoods into the lonely spaces of the urban everyday; the banality of evil so true a term to apply to the director's unsettling oeuvre.

In Creepy Kurosawa plots conjoined narratives. A retired detective pursues the cold case pet project of a family disappearance. Simultaneously, his wife encounters their creepy neighbour. Coincidence brings these strands ever closer on the journey to a disturbing destination.

As with past masterpieces Cure and Pulse, here Kurosawa remains a maestro of ominous mood building, offering only the slightest show of ankle and what’s to come. Again, the lurking subtext is of a disintegrating national sense of self. What differentiates Creepy from his best work, however, is format rather than theme or tone. Behind the curtain can never match imagination, and after the reveal halfway through the film’s two-hour running time, a second act of overt horror is a very different proposition to the masterfully played mystery of the first.