Don't be fooled by the synopsis -- Cure is more of a modern existentialist nightmare than a standard cat-and-mouse thriller. This is a movie that views humans as nothing more than blank figures twisted in different directions by obligations that mean nothing, animals in cages, always stagnant and ever-tortured by our constricting modern ways of life. This horror so integral to Cure is the horror of seeing our deepest fear, of losing control in a world we accept but cannot understand, reflected back to us.
In Cure, no one knows anything. A collective brain fog pervades this film, where no one knows where they're going, how they got there, what their name is, or why they killed their wife. Above all, no one knows who they are. Through the use of a hypnotic light, Mamiya illuminates his victims' hidden animalistic emotions that their modern existences force them to forget. He seeks to purge the socially-upright people he comes into contact with of their deep, seething hatred that builds up as they further construct themselves into a meaningless life, mistakenly "curing" them by unleashing their darkest, most primal emotions onto others.
Implicit in the film is Mamiya's belief that underneath all of our externally identifiable factors -- our names, occupations, jobs, there is no real us. These labels are just things we use to try to create a false image of ourselves. Peel the layers back, and you'll find nothing but a faded face, a void. Try to find yourself, and you'll find nothing. In a modern world, the process of "finding yourself" is picking and choosing labels and objects to contextualize your existence through instead of looking inward. Mamiya is constantly reborn through his intentional self-hypnotic amnesia and rejection of these objects -- so much time in this film is spent trying to build an image of an unknown person through his cast-aside belongings that he no longer has any kind of connection to.
He argues the pointlessness of defining ourselves by our professions and relationships whereas every other character in the film strives to find the "truth" through these means. Detective Takabe's split between his two worlds make him the perfect match for Mamiya's logic -- his life is made up of crafting two external personalities and hiding emotions that he knows better than anyone else what it means to consciously define yourself as something and act within a framework of actions/emotions that something requires.
The horrors of this film are shot objectively at first, in claustrophobic, composed static shots that correlate to Cure's suffocating modern hell, but subliminal images and hallucinations eventually degrade even the film's way of "showing us the facts" (which as Mamiya argues, there are none). Murders, mutilations, and one particularly gnarly face-skinning happen far away or off-camera, suddenly and with no build-up, recalling the horrors of everyday life that don't have minutes and minutes of dramatic buildup or suspenseful music played beforehand. Sudden, violent crimes for a strange, harsh world.
Cure is proof that the horror genre is not only severely underrated by most "cinephiles", but can often accomplish so much more than your average drama flick in the hands of a masterful director. With Cure and his later film Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa makes movies that are as much horror as they are far-reaching avant-garde cinema.