Pulse* / Kairo (2001)

There doesn’t seem any easier way to begin than to say that Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is quite possibly the greatest horror film ever made. In it, he has combined many of the themes of his earlier movies into an engrossing and terribly disturbing horror movie, while doing so without a drop of blood, a creaking door, a demon unloosed from Hell, a slasher, a screaming woman, or even a shocking crash on the soundtrack to make the watchers jump in their seats. Though there are ghosts, they are not seeking revenge on anyone – they are seeking help for the one thing that no one can give them.

Michi works at a rooftop gardening center, where Taguchi is late with a data project. Michi goes to get the computer disk and Taguchi seems fine, but while she searches through the stack of disks he hangs himself. Then his body evaporates, leaving only ashes on the wall. Yube, another worker, examines the disk and finds pictures of Taguchi watching himself watching himself watching himself in a never-ending series of computer screens, and before long Yube too has gone mad and then disappeared, leaving behind the same ash marks.

Kawashima is a college student who tries to sign onto the internet for the first time (it is 2001, when dial-up internet was still new and complicated.) The first thing he finds is a strange site that offers him a chance to see a ghost, and he disconnects immediately, only to be awakened by the computer coming to life in the night to show Taguchi’s images. He seeks help at the school computer lab, where Harue becomes intrigued and checks out his computer. She is gradually drawn into the mystery as well.

Kawashima meets a grad student in the library who suggests that after all this time the Afterlife is full, so the ghosts of the dead who can’t fit any more have been squeezed into the real world through the mysterious new internet. Yet this is only a theory, given before the bodies start falling and disappearing throughout the world.

It is Harue who describes the real horror: She has felt so lonely that she contemplated suicide but was stopped by the fear that the dead might still be lonely. To sleep, perchance to dream, as Hamlet would have it. And yet her loneliness continues, even after she has met Kawashima, leading eventually to her suicide.

None of the ghostly figures are ever identified. No one is visited by their dead family members or lovers, for example, and only now and then do the ghosts reveal their faces, sometimes the same as the people watching them. Thus, they are often ghosts to come rather than ghosts of the past. They never talk or make threats. They just pass though, first seen in the computer screens, then in the stacks of the library or the room behind people where we can see them but the characters can not, undefined shapes that seem to have no purpose and appear and disappear. A few who do see them try to lock them in, taping up the doors so nothing can escape through the cracks. But eventually the doors come open, and more and more ghosts come into the world, and more and more of the living decide to join them, jumping off buildings, shooting or hanging themselves, or just disappearing,  leaving behind the ash figure that soon scatters in the wind, until at last Tokyo is empty, planes crashing as they try to land, smoke rising from buildings in the distance.

Michi and Kawashima are the last to escape, trying to go as far away as possible, driving together through empty streets and past abandoned cars, but one mistake means only Michi and the captain of a ship she has reached manage to survive, desperately trying to find signals from any life anywhere else in the world, like the last people alive after a nuclear holocaust.

Pulse is an eerie movie in the very best sense. Everything is normal and yet nothing is normal. The camera moves slowly through apartments and buildings, computer labs and grocery stores, libraries and streets, and strange dark figures pass in the distance or in the foreground. But it refuses to resort to any cheap shocks. No one turns a corner and confronts a ghost. Takefumi Haketa provides an atonal score of what closed captions for the deaf would call “ominous music,” but he never resorts to the Psycho shrieks; most of the ghost scenes occur in absolute silence. It is a darkened world, but not one full of shadows; the interiors are dim and the exteriors all seem to have been photographed under cloudy skies and almost everything is shot through a brown filter. I first saw it on video-tape on a small TV where the dim-ness became simply murkiness and the movie had minimal effect; the second viewing on a large-screen TV was completely different. It is a theatrical experience, but since it is unlikely to be found in a theater at this date, it should be watched without a break, on a screen large enough to hold your attention as the mood builds. Streamed on your phone or computer screen, it will lose much of its power.

It has always been easy for movies to play on fears of new technologies, but they have almost always concentrated on the ways the technology could be misused. The computer connected to the internet offers a myriad of ways in which the device can be used to control someone’s life, to spy on them, or even to replace them, as we have seen in many movies made throughout the world. But Kurosawa sees the internet in a different, more prescient way. As Harue warns Kawashima, it will not make you feel more connected but rather more isolated. The loneliness of modern life is the real horror explored in the movie, a loneliness that is intolerable in life and can only be cured by death, if then.

Kurosawa’s Cure had been disturbing because of the feeling that horror came from inside normal people and could be easily unleashed by the terror of knowing oneself, but the movie itself depicted a mystery that was ultimately explicable. Charisma had extended that emptiness to the natural world, though with greater confusion of story line, but ended with an image of the end of the world. Pulse brings everything together – the emptiness of our modern lifestyle, the ghost world of traditional horror films, the confusions of new technology and social change – and gives us the end of the world, signified on a personal level by the ashes left by the bodies such as were found after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The whole world becomes the haunted house, so there is no escape.

It is not the kind of horror movie you can go to for shocks viewed in safety and joke about on the way home, nor the kind with a few great memorable moments. When you leave the theater or turn off the video, the world of the movie goes with you. Kurosawa aims for a horror film of mood, of mystery, in which the real and normal suddenly and inexplicably becomes abnormal and stays that way.  It is genuinely scary.

* While known as Pulse throughout the world, the Japanese title in most dictionaries is actually Circuit.