Patrick Preziosi
, December 11th, 2020 09:46
To mark the release of Kiyoshi Kurosawa s To The Ends of The Earth, Patrick Preziosi explores how the new film contextualises and capitalises on the director s last decade
Instead of parceling his already lauded work into more polite, tunnel-visioned explorations of a specific theme or mood, Kiyoshi Kurosawa spent much of the 2010s widening his films’ respective purviews. It’s a working method that’s consistently rewarded his longtime champions, and alienated those who think of him exclusively as a more artfully-minded than average horror director. Refusing to fully surrender to the tenets of genre filmmaking, Kurosawa has filtered his own personal preoccupations through the base demands of horror, melodrama, the thriller, and the welcomely messy confluence of all three. The critical peaks of the Japanese director’s career situate themselves somewhere within the late 1990s and early 2000s (where he was hailed as a master of J-ho