Kiyoshi Kurosawa has long been filed under "horror director," though his take on the genre is anything but standard. The villain of "Cure," his deeply creepy 1997 breakout film, is not a maniac with a sharp-edged weapon but a blank-faced drifter who hypnotizes his victims into killing themselves.
Kurosawa sees evil not as an outside force but integral to the strange, vaguely menacing nature of our universe. Given the right conditions — a weakening of the psychic immune system in "Cure" or a break in the wall between the living and dead in "Kairo (Pulse)," (2001) — we can all become vulnerable to its invasion. Also, he builds his scares from mundane materials — a flicking light, puddling water or red tape on a door.
Genre cinema, however, is defined by formulas that place limits on even the most creative. Kurosawa danced in his chains better than most, but his recent horror outings have been unfocused and uninspired, even verging on the farcical.