Original title: Kairo
Since 1989’s Sweet Home, Kiyoshi Kurosawa had been forging a unique niche for himself in Japanese horror. The extraordinary serial killer drama Kyua/Cure (1997) predates Hayao Miyazaki’s Ringu by a year and he went on to make further strange, often impenetrable horrors like Karisuma/Charisma (1999) and Kōrei/Séance (2000), the latter loosely based on the 1961 novel by Mark McShane, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, which had previously been adapted for the screen by director Bryan Forbes in 1964. Pulse was arguably Kurosawa‘s most commercially accessible film to date, though it retains the strange, often bewildering qualities of his earlier work.
The complex story follows two parallel storylines that finally merge together in a jaw-dropping final act. Kudo Michi (Kumiko Aso), newly arrived in Tokyo and working at a plant shop with Sasano Junko (Kurume Arisaka), Toshio Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo) and Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), becomes increasingly concerned when the latter goes missing after working on a computer disk. Michi calls on him only for him to suddenly commit suicide by hanging himself. Inspecting the disk that Taguchi was working on, they find an image of Taguchi staring at his computer monitor while a ghostly face stares at him from a second monitor. Yabe is lured to Taguchi’s apartment where a black stain on the wall where he hanged himself seems to manifest itself as Taguchi’s ghost. Behind a door sealed with red tape, he finds a ghost and later confides in Michi that he saw something horrible in what he calls “the forbidden room” before he too is transformed into a black stain. Michi later meets student Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato) who has recently signed up to a new internet service provider only to find that his computer only accesses a single website which plays a video of lonely people isolated in their rooms. He seeks advice from computer science student Harue Karasawa (Koyuki) and is told by a classmate that the souls of the dead are finding their way from an over-crowded afterlife into our own world via the internet. Meanwhile, across Tokyo people have been vanishing in large numbers and the Kanto district is being overrun by the spirits of the dead…
Kurosawa‘s is a ghost story in which the living are slowly, almost imperceptibly, being supplanted by the dead. Once the first few escape the confines of the “forbidden room”, making it past the mysterious red tape that seems to serve simultaneously as a marker of the barrier between worlds and the force that holds them back, the invasion is unstoppable. Kurosawa‘s ghosts are quite unlike any other spectres seen in other films. They’re not out for revenge or to alert the living to what really led to their deaths – they’re simply overflowing from the realm that they find themselves in – “the souls have no choice but to ooze into another realm,” a fellow student explains to Ryosuke. “That is to say, our world.” The internet, it’s suggested, has become a conduit for the lonely, lost souls of the overflowing netherworld in finally break through into ours.
There are a few jump scares here and there but mostly the film works by accumulating dread until it’s impossible to ignore. It trades on that most under-rated of horror tropes, the idea of something – or someone – being where they shouldn‘t be. Mysterious figures appear in backgrounds, on computer monitors, on the walls of apartments as indistinct black smudges, an image irresistibly reminiscent of the shadows burnt onto the ruined walls of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The characters are constantly baffled by things that shouldn‘t be there and Kurosawa is in no great hurry to explain to his audience what they’re seeing or why.
Pulse isn‘t a film that’s overly concerned with explanations. We only ever learn what the characters know, and that’s not much. The mechanics of the plot are straightforward enough but meaning proves elusive even on repeated viewings. What we get instead is that rising anxiety that Kurosawa does so well such that seemingly ordinary spaces like libraries, subway trains and unkempt student bedrooms suddenly feel ominous and deeply unsettling. It’s a trick Kurosawa deploys to shattering effect here and in many of his other films – by the end you’ll be none the wiser as to what’s really going on but you’ll feel thoroughly unnerved by it all.
Kurosawa has often been compared to David Lynch but somehow that never really feels right. Certainly, both directors dabble in tales of the mundane world being intruded upon by supernatural forces and both Makio Ika’s unnerving sound design and Takefumi Haketa‘s haunting music score recall the soundscapes created by Lynch, but otherwise the two men are very much doing their own things.
Pulse is chock full of audacious ideas, many of which we’ve never seen explored on screen before – no mean feat given just how old the ghost story was by the turn of the Millennium. It suggests that ghosts are a metaphor for loneliness and picks away at Japanese film concerns like teen angst, the detrimental, possibly addictive use of technology (the tech has inevitably but unavoidably dated the film – the sound of a dial-up modem seems alien to the younger viewer and a source of nostalgia for the older) and suicide. This isn’t your standard ghost film, in which the haunting often tends to be confined to a single location or centred around an individual. This is ghost story as end-of-the-world apocalyptic high drama but even then, it’s barely like any disaster movie you’ve seen before. The catastrophe sneaks up on us and the characters slowly, almost unnoticed. We’ve been programmed to accept ghost stories as small scale and intimate and by the time we realise that not just on-screen characters but what feels like much of the population of Tokyo has vanished, the disaster is already well under way. Early on, a character notes that Tokyo is a big place yet every time we step out onto the streets or into public transport, there seem to be fewer and fewer people to be found. The muted colour palette employed by director of photography Junichirô Hayashi gives the city a sickly, morbid feel even before the ghost invasion has been completed.
It’s a fascinating effect that sneaks up on you, catching you unawares when Kurosawa abruptly switches gears for the cataclysmic final act in which Tokyo burns and US Air Force transport planes plummet out of the sky. The switch from the fantastically creepy and subtly implied to the full blown apocalyptic should be jarring, but somehow Kurosawa makes it work. At two hours and with a pace that might charitably be described as glacial, it’s not a film that will sit easily with everyone but allow yourself to be caught up in the strange atmosphere, accept the strangeness of the plot as something that perhaps we were never supposed to fully understand and ride out that stately pace and it’s one of the most nerve-jangling rides in Japanese horror. Pulse was remade in the States in 2006 by Jim Sonzero and was followed by a brace of sequels, Pulse 2: Afterlife (2008) and Pulse 3 (2008), both directed by Joel Soisson.
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Daiei, Nippon TV, Hakuhoudou, Imagica; Executive Producer: Yasuyoshi Tokuma; Producers: Hiroshi Yamamoto, Toshio Hagiwara, Kiyoshi Ono, Chikara Takano; Planners: Tsutomu Tsuchikawa, Shigemiki Yokoyama, Yasutaka Ootsuka; Associate Producers: Tomo Jinno, Shun Shimizu, Seiji Okuda, Ken Inoue, Atsuyuki Shimoda; Script: Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Director of Photography: Junichirô Hayashi; Music: Takefumi Haketa; Production Designer: Tomoyuki Maruo
Haruhiko Katô (Ryousuke Kawashima); Kumiko Aso (Michi Kudou); Koyuki (Harue Karasawa); Jun Fubuki (Michi’s mother); Shinji Takeda (Yoshizaki); Koji Yakusho (captain); Shun Sugata; Kurume Arisaka (Junko); Masatoshi Matsuo (Yabe); Shun Sugata (president of Sunny Plant Hanbai); Kenji Mizuhashi; Masayuki Shionoya; Kaori Ichijou; Hassei Takano; Gou Takashima; Jun Yuuki; Noukou Morishita; Takumi Tanji; Shou Aikawa; Kenji Hasegawa
The EOFFTV Review 