A detective (Kôji Yakusho) is on the trail of a serial killer who never touches a single body. All the murders are committed by others, random people who kill in a fugue state and remember nothing of their actions. The only clue is that all the victims are marked with the same symbol.
This doesn't quite stray into the supernatural though it gives the same kind of feel as the Denzel Washington thriller Fallen from around the same time. I'm generally not a Vibes kind of person but the atmosphere in this movie is incredible. It is so claustrophobic in how it follows the detective and so expansive in how it follows the killer. Like all modern horror movies, it's about grief but also about the petty frustrations of life and specifically the creeping exhaustion of being a caregiver. The detective's wife is suffering from some kind of neurological disorder affecting memory (the movie doesn't specify further) and he has to deal not only with her actions but also her inability to understand her condition. He is drowning and she's blissfully unaware.
It's an incredible film and much more polished than Pulse, which is the other Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) I've seen. This is a stone cold classic J-horror and well worth the look. It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.
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