The title of ¡°Creepy,¡± the new shocker by horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa, sounds like an in-jokey self-parody. It¡¯s like titling a new Adam Sandler comedy ¡°Goofy¡± (or if you¡¯re not feeling charitable, ¡°Crappy¡°). But ¡°Creepy,¡± which premiered at this year¡¯s Berlin Film Festival, is also the title of the Yutaka Maekawa novel on which it¡¯s based. And despite his well-deserved reputation for raising goose pimples, Kurosawa has also made well-received straight dramas, including the 2008 ¡°Tokyo Sonata,¡± a dark film about family disintegration that won the Cannes Un Certain Regard section Jury Prize.
That said, ¡°Tokyo Sonata¡± also had surreal passages that were ¡ª creepy, if you will. So does this new film, though it begins as an all-too familiar drama about a cop in crisis.
Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a detective trained in criminal psychology, resigns from the force after his attempt to talk a dangerous suspect into surrendering goes disastrously wrong. He becomes a university lecturer and, with the aid of his understanding wife, Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi), starts to get his life back on track. But once a cop, always a cop. When a former colleague (Masahiro Higashide), comes to him with a six-year-old case of a missing family, Takakura can¡¯t help but investigate, which leads him to the left-behind daughter Saki (Haruna Kawaguchi), then a child, now a still-traumatized young woman.
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