Kiyoshi Kurosawa rose to international acclaim with this unsettling thriller that established the director’s unique brand of psychological horror, and the start of many fruitful collaborations with Koji Yakusho. The actor goes down the rabbit hole as a dogged detective investigating a series of grisly murders with the same modus operandi, but different unrelated perpetrators with seemingly no reason to kill. The detective fights to pin down an elusive hypnotist with the power to plant murder into minds, but he is slowly falling under the spell of darkness in the process.