phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2019

Creepy



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2016
Runtime: 2h 10min
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Genre Tags: Crime, Drama, Horror
Plot Summary: Takakura is a former detective. He receives a request from his ex-colleague, Nogami, to examine a missing family case that occurred six years earlier.

Poster - Title Card


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Outside Reviews:

Brian Tallerico
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

We’ve seen dozens of stories of the “Maniac Next Door,” but Kurosawa finds new depth in the subgenre, largely due to the realism of his filmmaking and the time he takes to tell his story. There’s not much flash in “Creepy” as the director chooses to ground unimaginable horror by placing it next to a story of an attempt to reclaim domestic bliss. We’ve all had times in our lives where we sought to find ourselves again, to make those we love happy, and get over a trauma. “Creepy” allows us to relate to and like Takakura and Yasuko, and then it drops a bomb, but it doesn’t so through a magic video tape or a haunted camera. It does so through someone right next door. What’s creepier than that?


Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Grade: B+ - Horror master Kiyoshi Kurosawa finds evil next door in Creepy

What other filmmakers do with close-ups or shadows, he does with wide shots, ellipses, and empty space. And the more successfully Creepy rationalizes itself, the more irrational it becomes, until it descends into one of those decrepit subterranean spaces that have stood in for the recesses of the psyche in Kurosawa’s movies. Under the (literal) surface of a drab suburban development, it finds a soundproofed mad scientist’s bunker, complete with a trap door straight out of a silent movie: a vision of absolute evil that somehow becomes more disquieting and suggestive as it becomes more obvious and literal.