Shiny and Oh So Bleak

What makes the unsettling of order in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films so shocking is how real and, by extension, permanent they feel. Ever since the United States annihilated tens of thousands in an instant over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there’s been a looming dread that the world could end entirely at a moment’s notice. That dread is dread because it’s not actualized; the world keeps spinning, the banalities of life goes on. A single interaction can change all of that, though. A single piece of violence can upend the whole world.

Take, for instance, the opening of Charisma, wherein a hostage rescue goes wrong and leads to an unnecessary death, as well as the cop fleeing his career for the woods before he falls under the influence of a mysterious tree and the people who circle around it. Out there in the woods, where his cell phone’s been abandoned along with the duty to protect and serve, the world seems to be already on the precipice of collapse. Standing along in the center of a grassy hill is one tree, hooked up with wires and fought over by various factions who all have their own ideas about the tree’s place, balance or malevolence. Whatever its true meaning or purpose is, the tree stands out—by mistake or a simple quirk of nature, the tree upsets the assumptions of the otherwise empty environment around it. And when it’s destroyed, a bigger one suddenly appears in its place. When the cop returns to the city at the end, it’s already on fire.

This is an opaque description of Charisma, and intentionally so. The nuances of K. Kurosawa’s plots and the strange, oneiric immediacy in how his scenes unfold bely the broad strokes that he so often paints his films with, moving from the disruption of the everyday, to trance, to total annihilation. Conceptually this is most obvious with Cure, where sudden and shocking murders are committed seemingly for no reason at the start of the film. When that film’s detective (also played by Charisma’s cop, Koji Yakusho) gets on the case and finds it to be a series of hypnoses leading to the crimes, he slips into a mesmeric state while investigating this psychotic, psychic killer, which ultimately leads to his own mental implosion. The film itself, like all of K. Kurosawa’s, doesn’t present a question of whether or not the world can return to “normal,” but when the characters will realize this impossibility; once the act is committed, it can’t be undone.

While earlier I framed this as coming back to the atom bomb, it’d be reductive to say that K. Kurosawa’s films and their splits with reality all harken back to that singular incident. After all, his films keep having these violent breaks from the every day, film after film, over and over. That’s because these violent, irreversible breaks keep happening. It’s no mistake that two of K. Kurosawa’s post-Covid films, Chime and Cloud, feature the denial of this new reality—in the former’s case, whether or not the sound being heard is real, and in the latter’s it’s the ripoff reseller’s inability to take responsibility for the world he is effecting. Whether a simple murder, nuclear bombings, or a pandemic, the world will never return to what it was before because it can’t, it’s permanently ruptured, cut open, and bled out. Before one can realize this, they’re sleepwalking through the end of the world, stuck on the idea that the world they knew last year or even last week could still exist, if only they could put the pieces of a vaporized puzzle back together.