Just watched his “Seance,” an updating of a ’60s English film I never saw. The plot: a medium and her husband get entangled in a kidnapping plot. Enough said.
This isn’t great Kurosawa, but it is a fine little thriller–exploiting (recent) conventions of Japanese horror (spooky hair and claw-like hands), and a reasonable little psychological suspense thriller, as well.
That’s where Kurosawa excels. One, his horror films–more than any other filmmaker working today–rely upon careful composition, evocative silences, and slow steady narrative progression to evoke dread… and that neat feeling of the “uncanny,” the anxious sense that some awful horror doesn’t just displace but underlies the everyday.
This is particularly important because (two) Kurosawa’s horrors seem resolutely social. Perhaps his best film is “Cure,” made not long after the Aum Shinrikyo subway gassing, which follows a serial-killer case… but again the genre is obliquely cited/reiterated, then subtly shifted. It’s spooky and smart.