Saturday movie night

Tonight we watched Cure, another movie that we got for Christmas. It starts with a bunch of people who've killed their wives and have no memory of why they did it. We follow the detective investigating these crimes as he deals with his mentally ill wife and tracks the man behind these killers. Once the man behind the killers is revealed, we watch the interaction between the detective and the suspect.

There's so much more to this movie than just a detective story; it's a psychological thriller that focuses on the meaning of self or the answer to the question, "who are you?" This idea was played out in part through the interaction between the two main characters. Clearly they were foils for one another and so there were differences between them but there were also similarities, and watching them play off one another gave the movie some more depth.

One thing that made this movie even more interesting was that many of the causes for the events in the movie were open to interpretation, and sometimes it was difficult to know what was going on right then. Even if we didn't understand what was happening all the time, the direction made every scene watchable. In fact, not everything was revealed through dialogue; the only way to understand most of what was going on was to watch each scene and follow the camera-work.

Anotherthing I noticed was that the sound was such an integral part in each situation. Many scenes had an almost inaudible sound that filled the background, if that makes sense. This sound varied depending on what was happening but ranged from machinery to heartbeats and created the atmosphere behind each scene. we don't see too many movies that use sound this way in a majority of the scenes. I especially liked that the sound wasn't the usual "music" we have in Western movies to show something scary or relevant for a particular character. I wish more movies used this kind of technique.

We very much enjoyed this movie and highly recommend it even though it's subtitled. There is a bit of gore early on but it's not too bad.