PULSE
(aka KAIRO)
**1/2 out of *****
Reviewed by Mandroid3000

Screening in the 2006 New Zealand International Film Festival
Back to KP's Film Fest Coverage

Genre
Horror

2001
Written and directed by
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cast
Haruhiko Katô .... Ryosuke Kawashima
Kumiko Aso .... Michi Kudo
Koyuki .... Harue Karasawa
Kurume Arisaka .... Junko Sasano
Masatoshi Matsuo .... Toshio Yabe
Shinji Takeda .... Yoshizaki
Jun Fubuki .... Michi's mother
Shun Sugata .... Boss
Sho Aikawa .... Employee

In the Japanese horror film Pulse the worst thing to fear about death isn’t death itself, but eternal loneliness. After death our ghosts reside in a dimension of finite space. Finite space which is now full, and overflows into our world (kind of like Dawn of the Dead’s zombies). What the ghosts want is an end to their loneliness, so they start (I’m still not sure exactly what they do) taking lonely people. Possessing them? Killing them? Somehow they make them feel less alone, and they enter the ghost’s realm. They do this over the internet, which plays out a lot less gimmicky than it sounds (this is not like FeardotCom). But I get the feeling that this helps no one, and eternal despair will be the result no matter what.

This is a horror film where people never truly connect. To underline the sense of loneliness and social isolation director Kiyoshi Kurosawa gives us shots with people placed at disconcertingly different distances away from the camera than we’re used to. Or he may have people in the same shot who are talking but not facing each other. He makes the city a lonely, grimy, unsocial place. A maze of decrepit single-occupant apartments all under-lit and uninviting to anyone but the occupant. Enough to make you rethink your JET application.

There are some quite affecting scenes early on. A young woman discovers the body of a coworker who’s committed (committing, it leaves the question open at this point) suicide. And the first time we see the strange dark images of lonely, possessed people on a computer screen is quite eerie. But by the end the discordant soundtrack with modem-distorted groaning grows a bit tired, and the ghost web cam shots of black figures slowly approaching the screen seems old. At nearly two hours the film couldn’t keep up a sense of dread, a deliberate pace, and this viewer’s attention.

Other than its length, another problem with the film is that intriguing ideas are mixed with surprisingly clunky scenes. Like the (I guess) origin-of-the-ghosts scene where a demolition crew tear down a building which has a haunted room which happens to have some internet wires running through it that the ghost escapes through.

This problem is especially jarring at the end. Just when the film it is trying to draw its most profound conclusions, plot contrivance and coincidence make it hard to focus on the film’s message. There’s the scene where a guy chases a completely unnecessary fuel cap into the last place you’d want to go. There’s also the unlikely search party success; they have absolutely no idea where to look but see an abandoned factory across the street and decide to give it a try and “Hey, presto!”.

Pulse has intriguing ideas within a not very good film. It’s has stretches where I thought “This is really good”, followed by stretches where the complete opposite was true. I want it to be better. I really wish it was good. But it’s not really, and I can’t recommend it.

I’m no booster of American remakes of Japanese horrors (I am capable of reading subtitles, thanks) but I’ll be interested to see the upcoming remake. Not with any hope that they’ll improve on the original, but just to see what tack they will take with a film about social isolation and eternal loneliness.

This film will screen in Wellington on August 2nd at 3:30pm and 6:00pm at the Paramount Bergman Theatre and on August 4th at 9:15pm at the Paramount Theatre. Refer to the Film Fest homepage for more information.

Or go back to KP's Film Fest Coverage

Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts)