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Kurosawa’s long-awaited return to his psychological J-horror roots, since his latest films were mostly art-house or social ones (Tokyo Sonata), finally occurred, and the result is quite similar to “Pulse” (Kairo). The story is based on Yutaka Maekawa’s novel.

The action in the film starts immediately, as a tragedy occurs when a serial killer detective Takakura was questioning, escapes. The result of the incident is for Takakura to resign, and to follow an academic career in criminal psychology. The script then moves in two axes. The first one takes place in the new neighborhood Takakura and his wife, Yasuko move in. While Yasuko wants to become friends with the rest of the neighbors, they treat her with suspicion except for Nishino, who seems to be the most peculiar of all, until, at least, he is proven to be utterly creepy. The second axis occurs when...

According to a lecture given early in “Creepy,” serial killers are broken down into three categories: organized, disorganized, and mixed characteristic. The first two are relatively easy to define, and thus simpler to track down. Mixed-characteristic killers, meanwhile, exhibit no discernible patterns. They’re puzzles, anomalies. You can probably guess which class of killer this detective story from Kiyoshi Kurosawa follows.

The director, whose genre mastery is most evident in the likes of “Pulse” and “Cure,” more recently delved into this territory in “Daguerreotype.” That old-fashioned haunt took him outside Japan with the help of Tahar Rahim, Olivier Gourmet, and Mathieu Amalric; “Creepy” is both a return home and a return to form. Here he’s woven a procedural yarn from a novel by Yutaka Maekawa that was either loosely adapted or strikingly aligned with the director’s long-established sensibilities.

Read MoreNew Films By Terence Davies & Kiyoshi Kurosawa Set Berlin Premieres,...

A trailer has been released for an unsettling Japanese psychological thriller called Creepy. This movie looks great, and it features one of the most insanely creepy smiles I've ever seen outside of The Joker. The movie looks like it will tell a very dark and twisted tale.

In comes from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and it's based on a novel written by Yutaka Maekawa. The story follows "ex-police detective and criminal psychologist Takakura, who moves to a quiet suburban town seeking peace and quiet, but soon begins to suspect that his neighbour is a psychopath who comes into people’s households and takes over their lives."

The following details about the film were offered in the synopsis:

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who won Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival 2015 for his elegiac drama “Journey to the Shore”, returns to genre in which he made his name with this “creepy” psychological thriller.

After an initial trailer with no English subtitles, a new preview has arrived for Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s thriller Creepy, making things obviously clearer for audiences here due to the addition. The story concerns an ex-detective and criminal psychologist (Hidetoshi Nishijima) with a happy, quiet life who has his tranquility disturbed when he begins to suspect his new neighbor (Teruyuki Kagawa) isn’t quite who he says he is. Featuring one of the creepiest smiles I’ve seen in quite some time from Kagawa, Creepy looks to be a dark and twisted thriller.

We said in our review: “Though the middle stretch does go on for longer than is strictly necessary – a good 20 minutes could easily have been shaved off without forsaking anything crucial – the eventual pay-off doesn’t disappoint. Featuring an industrial vacuum cleaner-cum-sealer, a mysterious mind-control drug — both spooky and narratively convenient, considering the characters’ screamingly preposterous behavior — and...

Keep up with the wild and wooly world of indie film acquisitions with our weekly Rundown of everything that’s been picked up around the globe. Check out last week’s Rundown here.

– Sony Pictures Classics have announced they have acquired the rest of Pedro Almodóvar’s full library of films, including “Pepi, Luci, Bom”; “Labyrinth of Passion”; “Dark Habits”; “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”; “High Heels” and “Kika.” Spc will release his latest, “Julieta,” in theaters on December 21.

Based on short stories by Nobel laureate Alice Munro, “Julieta” is “about a mother’s struggle to survive uncertainty. It is also about fate, guilt complexes and that unfathomable mystery that leads us to abandon the people we love, erasing them from our lives as if they had never meant anything, as if they had never existed. The cast includes Adriana Ugarte, Emma Suárez and Rossy de Palma. It...

Those left unsatisfied with Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s more distant, ethereal Journey to the Shore — those few who saw it on the festival circuit before it disappeared, at least — should be elated by the advance word on Creepy, his full-blooded return to horror. The fact that it received very fine notices upon premiering at Berlin doesn’t guarantee we in the U.S. can see it soon, however, so perhaps a longer preview will sate some desires for now.

The good news is that, if our review was on-point, not too much is conceded herein. As we said at the time, “With the threat to the protagonists unequivocally established, the ensuing narrative is essentially a smokescreen that allows Kurosawa to raise tension in the lead-up to a grand finale. Again working with Akiko Ashizawa, his regular cinematographer over the last decade, he constructs elaborate compositions that almost always contain elements furtively moving in the periphery.

Fans of Kiyoshi Kurosawa will rejoice since his latest film, “Creepy” will signal his return to the thriller genre, which was the one that made him an international sensation.

The film is based on the homonymous novel by Yutaka Maekawa and the story goes like this: After having narrowly escaped an attempt on his life at the hands of a psychopath, detective inspector Takakura quits active service in the police force and takes up a position as a university lecturer in criminal psychology. But his desire to get to the bottom of criminals’ motives remains, and he does not hesitate long when former colleague Nogami asks him to reopen an old case. Six years ago, a family disappeared under mysterious circumstances and to this day no body has been found. Takakura follows Saki’s memory. She is the only surviving family member from the case. While Takakura immerses himself in the old files,...

★★★☆☆ Creepy (Kurîpî) marks Kiyoshi Kurosawa's welcome return to genre filmmaking. Based on the novel by Japanese author Yutaka Maekawa, Kurosawa's latest does more than enough to warrant its moniker even if it fails to live up to expectations. Distinguished detective and criminal psychologist Koichi Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is called in to interview a young serial killer. There are, according to Takakura, three types of serial killer. The first two - the 'organised' and the 'disorganised' - account for the majority but there's a third, far rarer and harder to catch type: a killer with "mixed characteristics".