Kiyoshi Kurosawa, king of ambiguous dread, won’t say what his next movie’s about
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the Japanese writer-director behind some of the most unsettling horror movies of recent decades, including Cure and Pulse, has been having a pretty good year. He’s premiered two new films, one of which, Creepy, recently opened in the U.S. and ranks as some of his best work in years. (The other, Daguerrotype, doesn’t yet have an American distributor.) And he’s already finished his next film, a currently untitled project that’s been shrouded in a fair amount of secrecy.
From Screen Daily come the first bits of information we’ve had about the film: it’s an adaptation of a play (though Kurosawa won’t say which one) and is being described as a “sci-fi suspense film” by its studio, Nikkatsu. The movie is currently in post-production, though at this point, even the cast is unknown. Screen Daily quotes the director as saying, “I was conflicted about tackling the marriage of satire, humor, and sci-fi elements unique to the original work,” without specifying what the “original work” in question might be.
Considering how fundamentally irrational Kurosawa’s sense of eerie, off-kilter atmosphere can be, and the fact that his best movies only half-explain anything, we’ll say this bit of teasing is par for the course.