A Japanese police procedural by (not) Kurosawa that defies convention

I've been watching a Kurosawa film - a strange murder-mystery from 1997, Cure - and thinking how odd this is that the film would seem to be late-career Kurosawa and looked and felt absolutely unlike any film of his I'd ever seen, especially not the late films, with the imbued colors, the strong character development, the acute sense of place, the classical focus on form, and the occasional engagement with historical and literary material. Only when this feeling of dislocation became so acute that I had to look it up and saw that this is a different Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, not Akira. No relation, apparently! So let's take Cure on its own terms: this Kurosawa manages to create a film that breaks w/ convention in so many ways. At the center, this is a film about a young Tokyo police detective going through a difficult time in his marriage as work keeps him away from home and often in danger and his wife, seemingly without children or career, is becoming increasingly depressed and even perhaps suicidal. He ends up working on a serial-killer case who leaves the corpses with ghastly disfigurations (the film itself is not, by today's standards, particularly ghastly - though it's often really scary); soon we, and later he, realize that the "killer" is really a psychotic young man who hypnotizes his "victims" into performing the ghastly killings and through hypnosis of some sort implants images and ideas in the minds of his suspects - a serial hypnotizer, in effect - and eventually, when he confronts the detective, strives to make the detective his next victim. The filmmakers are smart enough to have the cop speak w/ various medical personnel who assure him that it's impossible to make a subject perform an act reprehensible to them, such as murder. But within the scope of this film, it's quite possible - and the victims are quite prominent and unlikely subjects: a schoolteacher, a doctor, a security guard, et al. The film is unsettling in many ways, especially I think in the detective's visit to the decrepit home of the young man, as we learn that he's a dropout medical student with many weird antisocial behaviors - none of which drew particular attention in the urban and urbane world of 1997 Tokyo. Not a pleasant film by any stretch, but a powerful police procedural that turns the conventional plot on its head.