Pulse

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001, initially released as Kairo) bathes the audience in a perpetual blanket of eerie, barely suppressed terror. Though the film begins with a supernatural presence terrorizing citizens from the internet, that presence soon becomes more powerful and ever-present, becoming an incalculable force. As such, Kurosawa blends his traditional themes of isolation, alienation, and psychological recovery into a nightmarish film wherein human connection is the only thing that separates us from dissolving into immateriality.

Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô) is a typical slacker college youth who finally decides to hook up the internet for some sort of connection to the rest of the world. However, he is soon put on edge when the computer mysteriously boots up a haunted image of a cloaked figure. Kawashima finds help in Harue Karasawa (Koyuki), a fellow student who is trying to understand the growing phenomenon of the cloaked figures. Eventually, they come to realize that the spirits of the dead have no more haven in the afterlife and are now coming back to terrorize the living into insanity and suicide so that they can lay claim to earth. Meanwhile, Michi Kudo (Kumiko Aso) is struggling to maintain her sanity in the greenhouse where she works as she witnesses untold sights of horror and shock.

Kurosawa continuously builds the tension by alluding to events, such as the red tape, the forbidden room, the utter seclusion from the world, prior to actually revealing them to be central to the free-flowing narrative, which lets him ratchet up the story in subtle shifts. Rather than the “boo” factor present in American horror films, here Kurosawa relies on our susceptibility to the dark, hiding his most disturbing imagery in the shadows so that they are only revealed once the camera or the character moves, so that it is the character, and not the director, who orchestrates the curdling pressure as the film reaches its peak.

There are some who feel the film lacks a narrative drive, that it repeats itself unnecessarily with the same scares, but the film is more sophisticated than that. Beyond extrapolating out an conscious fear of technology and a desolate sense of abandonment, Kurosawa lets his story become one of intimacy, detailing how those who remain together pose the greatest possibility for survival. While it might be presumptive to suggest that the film wields a certain Darwinian link between human connection and survival, it seems obvious that Kurosawa wants to posit the idea that emotional intimacy can obviate thoughts of suicide or torture.

The last ten minutes of this film contain some of the most apocalyptic and powerful images that I have ever come across, and the whole film succeeds because of this go-for-broke approach. This is one of the most fascinating and horrific films you’ll ever see, so see it.

Pulse: 10/10