Understated and Unbelievably Upsetting: Our Review of ‘Creepy’ on DVD

Posted in Blu-Ray/DVD, Movies by - March 03, 2017
Understated and Unbelievably Upsetting: Our Review of ‘Creepy’ on DVD

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You know sometimes there is just something to be said for NOT getting to know your neighbors.

We often forget how the simple things are the best as Creepy now available on DVD is an old fashion testament to the power of mood and tension as devices to get your skin to crawl.

A year after a botched hostage negotiation with a serial killer that turned deadly and put detective Koichi (Hidetoshi Nishijima) in the hospital, this ex-detective is now finally feeling at home in his new job and a criminology lecturer at the university and with his wife in their new home.  However with a new home, comes new neighbours and the one they seem to have inherited (Teruyuki Kagawa) is a deeply strange one.  When his old colleagues from the police force coming calling to ask for his help on a mysterious new case, he finds that this new case just might be connected to the increasingly strange things that keep happening next door.

Ultimately a return to the style that made him a global force, Writer/Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa gives us what is basically the anti-thesis of a ‘jump scare’ as this is a 130 min slow burn that gets underneath your skin so subtlety that before you know it, things have gotten pretty damn crazy.

Famous for making our skin crawl with movies like Cure & Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa gives us something with Creepy that plays like Hitchcock but much more morbidly then he could have ever gotten away with.  It’s a simply shot film, but it’s also one that knows when to hit those high notes at the same time.  It never hammers us over the head with anything but it lets the truly insidious nature of evil over take us at such a methodically deliberate pace that it gets us as audience to such a fever pitch that we react to every little nuance that gets thrown at the screen.  It never gets us to react…until we can’t do anything but react and be overwhelmed as its use of silence and negative space ends up being absolutely devastating.

Hidoshi Nishijima plays the stoic hero quite well, at first seemingly like he missed his old life of crime fighting until his paranoia ended up turning in ways that even he could have never even expected.  It’s a reserved performance but it is ultimately supposed to be as he is a man who is supposed to hold on to his logic in the face of insanity.  Teruyuki Kagawa is brilliant on the other side of the coin as he doesn’t play it as terrifying, yet he plays the villain in such a gleeful almost over the top kind of way that it sneaks up on us.  If you look up unhinged neighbour in the dictionary, you’ll see this guy he is that good and together these two men simply make the movie.

Picture quality on the DVD is nice a clean with English subtitles (of course) but the only extra is a trailer.

Ultimately, for any hardcore film looking to really get into a different tone of filmmaking needs to look into the entire oeuvre of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and especially Creepy as it is a masterstroke of psychological horror that doesn’t use a single jump scare or overt amounts of fake blood to get the message across.

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  • Release Date: 2/28/2017
This post was written by
David Voigt is a Toronto based writer with a problem and a passion for the moving image and all things cinema. Having moved from production to the critical side of the aisle for well over 10 years now at outlets like Examiner.com, Criticize This, Dork Shelf (Now That Shelf), to.Night Newspaper he’s been all across his city, the country and the continent in search of all the news and reviews that are fit to print from the world of cinema.
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