This is an excellent Japanese horror movie. Thoughtful, creepy, unsettling & very well directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi. On the one hand you have your standard urban horror themes of loneliness & technology-as-villain (in this case computers & the net). On the other there's this speculation about what might be waiting for us 'on the other side.' Is death, as one of the characters wonders aloud at one point, a chance to be reunited with loved ones & so no longer endure the day to day loneliness of life? But as it turns out, being dead is just as miserable & painful an experience for the ghosts as being alive is for the human characters, something Kurosawa demonstrates in a number of genuinely unsettling sequences.
Kiyoshi has an excellent & mature style - demonstrating a preference for long takes (a style that'll likely drive impatient teenage horror fans up the wall) & shocks achieved within the frame rather than through flashy editing. Two sequences epitomise this - in one a young woman searches an apartment for her co-worker in vain while a shadowy figure rises silently from a chair at the back of the room behind her. It might not sound terribly creepy but honestly I think my heart skipped a beat when that happened. In the other - & this is undoubtedly one of the films most talked about moments - a woman jumps to her death & the camera unblinkingly records her fall & impact with no cutting away.
But don't get the idea this is some J-horror gorefest because it isn't. What's so refreshing for me about 'Pulse' is that rather than harping on gore & shocks for two hours the director takes the time to lay out an intriguing story. One in which ghosts are flooding back into our world because there's no more room in theirs. The only trouble being that when ghosts & real people come into physical contact with each other neither can survive. Throughout Pulse Kurosawa balances the increasingly apocalyptic imagery of a hi-tech Tokyo in which life has all but ceased with an insistently humanist theme. Our characters clearly care for each other & the story culminates with a small group of survivors setting sail toward an uncertain future. Meanwhile the heroine of the story comes to realise that having found a temporary happiness with the young student who helped her escape she now has the strength to go on.
I'd like to think that's really what Kurosawa is getting at here. Not for him the simple scares of a ghost story, nor the fashionable sense of nihilism (hey, we're all doomed!) which so appeals to moody teens, but the message that in life the small bonds we make with each other, those passing moments of happiness & kindness, these are what shield us from loneliness & enable us to keep going in an unforgiving universe. Seen that way it makes for an appropriate visual metaphor that the final shot of Pulse is a stunning birds-eye view of a tiny shipful of humanity adrift in a vast ocean.
I look forward to seeing more films by Kurosawa Kiyoshi.
One last point: a sequence in Pulse depicts a jetliner seen from street level falling out of the sky & crashing into a building. On the DVD featurette there's a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a location recce for this particular scene. The date? June 2000. Talk about prophetic.
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arsalhyder18-1
17 years ago
I agree with each and every word of you. I felt the exact same things from the movie. My sister saw the entire movie without even fliching at any scene and told me it was incredibly boring, but I find it to be the scariest movie I've seen for years and maybe years to come.
PS. Also, the point where Kawashima 'catches' the ghost made me miss a few heartbeats too.
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rainbird131162
17 years ago
Also, the point where Kawashima 'catches' the ghost made me miss a few heartbeats too.
Yes, that was a pretty heart-pounding scene. A favourite of mine was the one where Junco goes into the forbidden room and her friend pulls her away from a ghost in the nick of time. I thought the way director Kiyoshi staged that was great because all the action happens in the frame. It doesn't rely on shock editing, the ghost is already there, lurking in the shadows, and it scares the crap out of you when you suddenly realise that what you thought was a shadow caused by the low lighting is actually one of the ghosts. Another sequence I really liked was when Harue and Kawashima are fleeing on an empty train and Kawashima tells her that even if there's nobody else around he's with her, 'We are both definitely here' he says and she responds by resting her head on his shoulder. I found that touching. Kawashima's staement is like a little affirmation of life, a gesture of defiance against the loneliness that's swept away everybody else. I also loved the sequence at the end when Kawashima is being driven through Tokyo and we see the burning cars, the empty streets and the bodies on the pavements. That was extremely well done, the music adding much to the sense of doom.
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