Kiyoshi Kurosawa: The Master of the Empty Frame

You go to a friend's house for dinner. The first thing you see is a human-sized cage in the corner of the room. They lock the door behind you. They carry on, never acknowledging the cage, and ask about your day. You try to play along, eyeing the cage, waiting for its purpose to be revealed. Is it for you? If not then who? Will you only find out once it's too late?

Kiyoshi Kurosawa uses still, empty frames to create a sense of dread and the implication that something horrible has happened or is about to happen. The more you watch his films the more you begin to recognize the warning signs. With Kurosawa, even an empty room can feel like a loaded gun.

The prolific Japanese filmmaker has been crafting films nonstop since the mid-80s, spanning from slice of life melodramas all the way to bone-chilling psychological thrillers on par with Silence of the Lambs. While all share a similar visual language, none feel more thematically intertwined than Cure, Pulse and Retribution. Made from 1997 - 2006, these three films stand as an ode to the end of humanity. Emptiness born from evil, whittling away at the world around it, rendering it hopeless, soulless and detached. In Cure, emptiness has an avatar in the form of hypnotist serial killer Kunio Mamiya: A man who has ostensibly removed his own soul from his body using an obscure form of mesmerism. He is entirely without person, never truly present and always existing in a haze, only gaining lucidity when imparting his evil onto others. He wishes to make the world as empty as he is.

Kurosawa often frames Mamiya and his protagonist Takabe in the same way: on the furthest edge of the frame, partnering them with vacuous space as if they were receding into the distant darkness at the edges of your vision. Mamiya, practically a shadow, occupies these empty rooms like a knife in the darkness. An unseen danger until it's too late. He is alone and light cannot reach him. Takabe, on the other hand, has created his own distance through his work and fear, not care or concern, for his mentally ill wife; he has isolated himself on both fronts. For Takabe, emptiness is avoidance. He drifts in space moving further and further away from everyone around him.

With Pulse, emptiness is the byproduct of isolation and detachment due to the advent of the internet. Despite being more connected than ever, we've never been more alone. That emptiness becomes a portal for spirits from the other side to come into our world and wreak havoc. Emptiness is a virus that spreads from computer to computer, person to person, until everyone has succumbed to it. Kurosawa is much more explicit with his visuals this time around. Continuing his style of stillness, rarely moving the camera unless motivated, Kurosawa lingers on dark hallways and empty apartments. Shadows are always creeping at the edges. The horror of Pulse comes when the emptiness is interrupted by the plodding movement of a ghost moving excruciatingly slow towards the camera or a shadow crossing the background.

Something about the internet seems to have created a fear in Kurosawa that began to manifest as visions of the end of the world. Once our reach was no longer limited to just those around us, Kurosawa saw the potential for the influence of evil to spread out into the world. By the end of Pulse, anyone connected to dial-up has died, disappearing entirely. The idea is presented pretty broadly, as an expression of the internet as a mysterious thing that entered our lives so quickly, seemingly from nowhere, that everyone is pressured into adopting. It seems Kurosawa saw online communication and instantaneous connection as a virtual transference of the soul. Our souls moving from one plane to another, stretched and diluted between here and there, making us more susceptible to spiritual interference.

Side Note: He revisits this idea in his most recent film Cloud but with a much more grounded, albeit darker approach. He finally understands how the internet can make us worse and it's much more mundane than we could ever imagine.

Retribution, Kurosawa's last true horror film, the perfect synthesis of Pulse and Cure is the ultimate expression of these ideas. The director utilizes wide shots to create something far more voyeuristic this time around and transforms the camera into the eyes of the ghost that haunts our protagonist. With Koji Yakusho back in the lead role playing another surly detective, eerily similar to his character from Cure, this entry feels like the aftermath of both films. Here, the world might as well have already ended. With his love of rear projection amplified, Kurosawa's Japan has never felt more like an illusion. Nothing feels real. Every building feels devoid of life. The frames are emptier than they've ever been. Kurosawa has mastered stillness, so much so that the simplest camera movement can elicit a fearful gasp. Even just revealing the other side of a room feels like a jumpscare.

In the film, a vengeful spirit terrorizes her victims, killing them because they ignored her in life, despite none of them ever being aware of her existence. She was confined to a mental hospital on the edge of a river. Every day a ferry would pass by and she waited for someone on board to acknowledge her. Even with the hustle and bustle of morning commuters just outside her window she was isolated, alone and disconnected. When her last victim is killed, she refuses to stop, continueing to take lives until there is no one left in the world. No one but Yakusho, who is always just as alone as she was.

There's a sense of madness that permeates Retribution. There's a dash of The Shining here. Every window inside every building is blown out with white light never showing us what's outside beyond the walls we occupy. Everything feels haunted. It could be argued that the characters are the ones haunting this film, unknowingly trapped in a sort of purgatory, investigating their own demise. Everyone’s fate is inevitable.

Kurosawa fears the impersonal. An empty room with no one in it is a sad thing. An empty person with no soul is a horrifying idea. Being all alone in the world is hell.