Welcome back. As part of our continuing 90's Neo-noir series, we're taking a look at Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1997 masterpiece, CURE, staring Koji Yakusho, Masato Hagiwara, Tsuyoshi Ujiki, and Anna Nakagawa.

Yakusho stars as Takabe, a detective unraveling a series of brutal murders, each marked by an "X" carved into the victims' bodies. The only link: a mysterious drifter. Kurosawa, ever the genre anti-stylist, contorts the noir framework into something eerily familiar yet unsettlingly alien, crafting one of the most mesmerizing and psychologically abrasive thrillers ever made.

CURE, often hailed as a pioneer of the J-horror wave, is an undeniable classic. In this episode, we'll get to the bottom of why that is.