Creepy (2016)

Original title: クリーピー 偽りの隣人

Warning: there will be copious spoilers!

Some time ago, Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) was one of the few Japanese police investigators well versed in American profiling techniques. After an incident that resulted in the death of several people and grievous injury to himself, Koichi retired from the force, and now works as a university lecturer on criminal psychology. His wife Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi) and he have just moved into a new house in easier reach for his new job. And, one suspects, also to draw a hard line between the past and the present. The marriage certainly isn’t in the best state, either, both partners performing the roles of a loving couple more than actually living them.

Soon, though, Koichi finds himself falling back into old habits he promised Yasuko to change, poking around a cold case involving the disappearance of three members of a single family who left behind their daughter Saki (Haruna Kawaguchi). Saki’s vague statements concerning the case never made much sense to anyone involved in the investigation, and when a former colleague and friend of Koichi hears of his interest in the case, he asks him to interview the now nearly grown up girl. What he hears from her suggests a very particular and strange kind of serial killer.

At the same time, Yasuko has repeated and increasingly disturbing encounters with one of their neighbours, Mr. Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa). Something is very off about that man as well as his family, and he seems to develop some kind of hold over her.

Of all the directors who came to a degree of international fame during the great J-horror boom, Creepy’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been the one whose films have been the most consistent in quality; by now, I don’t believe Kurosawa is actually able to make a bad or even just a mediocre movie. Among the themes creeping up again and again in the director’s films, alienation is one of the strongest and clearly of great importance to him. In the case of Creepy, Kurosawa concerns himself with the quiet alienation between members of a family, with people who are nominally close going through the motions of personal relations, never even getting up the energy to shout much about their problems – that would, after all, be emotional, and the characters in the film are mostly involved in shutting out their emotions for another until only the outer veneer of them exists.

It’s this gap between what they actually feel and try not to feel, and what they express the film’s serial killer thrives on, dominating family members and playing them against one another by providing them with the opportunity to violently express all the things they leave unsaid as well as with drugs that makes it so much easier for them to keep the emotions they are afraid of at bay. There’s even more to the character, in the way he uses whom he leaves alive of the families he preys on to construct a fake family of his own; in a fitting bit of irony he certainly doesn’t appreciate, a family that is quite a bit more built on lies then the ones he destroys ever were.

A look at Creepy’s basic plot construction might raise a few eyebrows, for Kurosawa asks you to accept that the serial killer Koichi begins to hunt just happens to be his neighbour now and that said serial killer is – apparently without violence - able to turn a reasonable woman like Yasuko into his drug-addled accomplice over the course of a few days. However, I don’t think Kurosawa is actually interested in making the kind of straightforward thriller where this thing would be a problem, for both these narrative problems (if you want to call them such) – as well as some rather more minor ones later on – fit very well into the film’s meaning: Nishino just happens to be the Takakura’s neighbour because, the film suggests, every family is like them, so he might as well be theirs, and Yasuko falls as quickly as she does because she needs exactly the kind of destruction and/or structure (both things seem closely related in the film; see also Nishino’s house that is at once a building site and a well constructed death trap) the killer provides.

While Creepy is sometimes unwilling to play to the standard rules of the thriller, it still uses many a trope and many a visual concept from the genre. Kurosawa is colliding these with the earnest Japanese domestic drama most beloved by western critics when it comes to the country’s movie output (and one he has worked in as well) explores what happens during and after the collision, quite literally finding the horror beneath the calm bourgeois surface in the wreckage. And Creepy is truly a horror film, too, full of moments of expectant dread when another character steps into Nishino’s house, a place nobody leaves unchanged (and few alive); culminating in various acts of violence that are as haunting as they are not just because of Kurosawa’s unflinching depiction of them, but because of the natures of the perpetrators, and what this means.

The acting is spectacular throughout, with Teruyuki Kagawa’s indeed very creepy performance certainly a stand-out, but also nuanced work by Takeuchi (who easily convinces the viewer of things that should be difficult to swallow) and Nishijima.


It’s all held together by moments of incredible filmmaking. Just watch the way the scene becomes darker and darker, and the rooms closer and closer in Koichi’s interview with Saki Honda, and that’s just one perfectly staged and imagined scene among dozens. Kurosawa is equally adept at the moments of horror and dread as he is at the domestic drama (with echoes of very classic Japanese cinema in the last one, not surprisingly), but more importantly, he easily keeps a film under control that would in lesser hands burst under the pressure of too much meaning, too many genres colliding, and too many improbabilities, and so proves that all these elements do indeed belong together in Creepy.