Pulse: A must-watch Halloween film
“Would you like to meet a ghost?” This question is asked of our protagonists in the 2001 techno-horror film Pulse several times, serving as the opening of the rabbit hole in director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s haunting digital ghost story. Pulse (or Kairo in its native Japanese) was released at the peak of J-horror mania of the late 90s and early 2000s, where Japanese horror films such as Ring (1998) and Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) gained widespread acclaim in the West. Yet, with this masterpiece, Kiyoshi Kurosawa announced himself as the most accomplished and innovative of the creative voices in the newfound peak of this filmmaking movement.
Before Pulse, Kurosawa was most well known for his 1997 psychological thriller Cure, which received widespread critical acclaim through its circulation throughout the US film festival circuit. Knowing this, Kurosawa played into the general mood of the J-horror scene, meaning Pulse is a film deeply concerned with the problems of modernity and people’s evolving relationship with technology…meanwhile, Kurosawa wisely scorns gloomy gothic castles and the remote countryside in favor of cramped Tokyo apartments, plus the ever-inscrutable digital realm.
Pulse possesses an unusual storytelling structure, featuring two storylines unfolding in parallel that converge in the film’s latter half. One plotline features flower shop worker Michi investigating the mysterious disappearance of a withdrawn coworker; the other focuses on university student Ryosuke receiving disturbing messages and images through his computer. Because of this unique plot construction, Pulse moves somewhat slowly, compared to what many contemporary horror audiences may be more comfortable with. This somewhat unhurried pace is a feature, not a bug, of the film. Kurosawa masterfully wields a sense of grim inevitability throughout the project, leaving viewers with a limp, disconcerting powerlessness akin to watching a slow-motion fatal car crash.
Similarly, Kurosawa uses deliberate, controlled camera movements to frighten the audience. Instead of conveying the arrival of a new horrific element to a scene with a rapid whip pan, zoom, or cut accompanied with a loud sound effect—as is the norm with many popular horror filmmakers—he often introduces new elements with an almost agonizingly slow pan; frequently depicted in perfect concert alongside the film’s disturbing, near-operatic soundtrack by Takefumi Haketa.
Kurosawa frequently toys with his audiences’ fear of what may not be immediately apparent; the depiction of pixelated computer screens and webcams can often obscure or distort what truly is or is not happening in the narrative, creating unsettling segments. For example, one of the film’s most disturbing scenes focuses on Michi attempting to use her cell phone in the foreground while someone climbs a tower in the background, ready to take their own life. In addition, Kurosawa and cinematographer Jun'ichirô Hayashi paint the whole film with a grim color palette of grays, dull greens, and washed-out yellows, imbuing the whole picture with a sense of omnipresent dread and decay.
If not already abundantly clear, Pulse has remained distinct for its depiction of death and the afterlife not as an eternity of torture or salvation, but as a simple unending state of all-consuming loneliness and isolation, where the dead are desperate to invade our world to escape: a morbidly fascinating concept which itself could be its own article. Plus, Pulse is notable for its prophetic themes: the internet serves as a factor of isolation and confusion, a far cry from the optimistic zeitgeist of an increasingly connected world at the turn of the millennium. Because of this, we can look back on this film as a remarkably prescient depiction of how the digital world has come to affect every facet of our lives.
Kurosawa’s Pulse is a film that wants us to linger with this idea and be frightened of the modern world we have created: The characters are dwarfed by the concrete urban architecture, consumed and reduced by digital infrastructure, and living in a constant state of isolated living, death—a fate many know too well.