The title of "Creepy," the new shocker by horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa, sounds like an in-jokey self-parody. It's like titling a new Adam Sandler comedy "Goofy" (or if you're not feeling charitable, "Crappy"). But "Creepy," which premiered at this year's Berlin Film Festival, is also the title of the Yutaka Maekawa novel on which it's based. And despite his well-deserved reputation for raising goose pimples, Kurosawa has also made well-received straight dramas, including the 2008 "Tokyo Sonata," a dark film about family disintegration that won the Cannes Un Certain Regard section Jury Prize.
That said, "Tokyo Sonata" also had surreal passages that were — creepy, if you will. So does this new film, though it begins as an all-too familiar drama about a cop in crisis.
Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a detective trained in criminal psychology, resigns from the force after his attempt to talk a dangerous suspect into surrendering goes disastrously wrong. He becomes a university lecturer and, with the aid of his understanding wife, Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi), starts to get his life back on track. But once a cop, always a cop. When a former colleague (Masahiro Higashide), comes to him with a six-year-old case of a missing family, Takakura can't help but investigate, which leads him to the left-behind daughter Saki (Haruna Kawaguchi), then a child, now a still-traumatized young woman.