Cure ends with Detective Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho) finally rid of Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), the amnesiac drifter linked to a string of murders in which ordinary people kill without motive and carve an X into their victims. After Mamiya escapes custody, killing a police officer on the way out, Takabe tracks him to a deserted building and shoots him. As he dies, Mamiya traces one last X in the air, and Takabe keeps firing. Inside the building, Takabe finds an old phonograph cylinder and plays it, hearing a man’s voice, thought to belong to the mesmerist whose methods Mamiya had studied, murmuring what sound like hypnotic instructions. Soon after, a brief shot reveals Takabe’s mentally ill wife, Fumie (Anna Nakagawa), dead in her hospital with an X cut into her throat. In the final scene, Takabe sits alone in a restaurant, calm and well-fed for the first time in the film. His waitress walks away from his table, a coworker whispers something to her, and she quietly picks up a large knife as the film cuts to black.
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Does Takabe Become the New Mamiya at the End of Cure?
Kiyoshi Kurosawa never says so outright, but every clue points that way. Mamiya spent the whole film treating Takabe less like an adversary than an heir, prodding him about the resentment he hides toward his wife and hinting that the two of them are more alike than Takabe wants to admit. The killings never really needed Mamiya himself, only someone to pass the suggestion along, which is why his death doesn’t end anything. Whatever Takabe heard on that recording, he walks out of the building changed. Fumie’s death is never shown, and the film leaves the timing hazy, but the X on her neck is the same mark every hypnotized killer left behind. Then comes the restaurant. The exhausted, short-tempered man from the rest of the film is gone, replaced by someone eating heartily and smoking in peace, and the waitress who served him is suddenly holding a blade. Kurosawa cuts before she does anything with it, but he doesn’t need to show more. The chain has a new link.
READ MORE: Read our review of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse
What Does the Ending of Cure Mean?
The title is the joke at the heart of the film. Kurosawa originally called it Evangelist and changed it after the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, but Cure may be even more pointed. Mamiya never plants violence in anyone. He simply strips away whatever is holding it back, and the people he meets are “cured” of the restraint that kept their frustrations buried. Takabe is the clearest case of all. He is a decent, dutiful man worn down by a demanding job and a wife who needs constant care, and the film repeatedly lets us see how much he resents both. By the end, he has been freed of that burden in the most horrifying way possible, and he has never looked better.
Kurosawa would return to that idea of a sickness moving from person to person in Pulse, and decades later in Chime, but he has never made it feel more intimate than here.
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