Pulse (2001)It is said that dying is something that you have to do alone. Pulse (2001) is a Japanese horror movie about an encroachment of ghosts into the living world. They plague humanity by driving people exposed to these spirits into depression and self-destruction. Set in Tokyo, it is comprised of two concurrent stories--one about a greenhouse florist named Michi Kudo (Kumiko Asō), and another about an economics student named Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato). Both Michi and Ryosuke experience this insidious invasion by watching it slowly destroy their friends and loved ones before setting its sights on the whole world.
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Japanese horror movies have developed a reputation for being graphic and twisted in their depiction of violence and scares, but Pulse represents a counterpoint to this stereotype. Instead, Pulse excels at creating creepy, tense scenes with little justification, giving them a deliberately confusing and unnerving quality. This is heightened by the disorienting back and forth stories of Michi and Ryosuke, and some supporting characters. The story begins with Michi and her co-workers talking about how one of them, Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), has been absent from work for some time while he works on a computer disk. Michi goes to his apartment to check on him, only to find that it has fallen into disarray. Taguchi later emerges from the shadows, aloof and withdrawn. For a moment, Michi turns away, and finds that in that narrow window of time, Taguchi has hanged himself. Taguchi's suicide haunts Michi and her colleagues; one of them, Toshio Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo), visits the apartment for himself, finding a black smear--like a shadow--where Taguchi's body was, and a crumpled paper with a cryptic message: "The Forbidden Room". Somehow, Toshio discovers that this is about an actual room with red tape lining the cracks of the door. He removes the tape and goes inside, only to be confronted by a woman whose body gyrates and seems to levitate, cornering the panicked Toshio behind a sofa. Although not expressly stated, it is understood that this is a ghost. Subsequently, Toshio experiences the same melancholy that afflicted Taguchi, and ultimately vanishes, leaving behind that same sooty, human-shaped smear in his wake. Elsewhere, Ryosuke decides one sleepless night to install an internet browser on his computer, connecting to the primitive internet by dial-up modem and launching the app by CD-ROM. (This was 2001, after all.) His first experience with the worldwide web is chilling. He is almost instantly navigated to a series of creepy videos of people in darkness, including one of a person with a bag over their head, with the Japanese lettering of "help me" messily scrawled on the wall over and over again behind them. Understandably freaked, Ryosuke powers off the computer...but it comes back to life on its own anyway! Growing increasingly worried, he seeks out aid from burgeoning computer science students, and is helped by an attractive young woman named Harue Karasawa (Koyuki), who tries to help him solve the mystery, only to get dragged into it herself.
Pulse was made in an age when the internet was a strange--even supernatural-esque--arena. Just consider how our decade's applications of the internet would look to someone even twenty years ago--like magic or something from a science fiction story. This movie intimates that the internet is also a kind of portal between the overfilled land of the dead and our realm, but there's more to it than that. A later part of the story adds that someone discovered that these overflowing spirits could be contained in structures by sealing them off, apparently with red tape. The only problem is that when the container is breached, the spirits escape and continue to use that room as a kind of "spout" to pour forth from the afterlife and into our world. This way of describing spirits as a kind of dangerous force that is difficult to contain reminds me of various nuclear disasters, like Chernobyl, and their long-term, tragic aftermaths Pulse establishes some "rules" like this for its ghosts, but they are really there because in their own vague way, the answers only offer cold comfort. What seems like an isolated incident with Taguchi quickly spreads like a pandemic, and by the time this explanation surfaces, it becomes clear that it is already too late to stop it. So instead of the answers offering hope, it only adds to the despair, which is a central theme of Pulse. The musical score for this movie by Takefumi Haketa is unlike any I have heard from its contemporaries. It is haunting and chilling, emotional and full of dread; it reminds me of Howard Shore's similarly unnerving scores from movies like The Silence of the Lambs or Scanners. The cinematography by Jun'ichirô Hayashi is also essential in establishing this mood of hopelessness. The camera seems to stare for long periods of time, as if spacing out or deep in contemplation, and is rarely ever moving with any urgency. It lingers on chilling images, be they the worried protagonists or the unsettling specters that emerge from time to time. There are a couple of editing tricks that deal with the ashen shadows that also make it clear that these are the residual souls of Michi's departed friends, and their presence only compounds her grief.
Despite the advances in internet technology by today's standards, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse is a surprisingly forward-thinking movie in the way that it draws a link between how we use the internet as a replacement for human interaction and the loneliness that follows. It's interesting that these videos of people in despair that Ryosuke watches exist on his computer at all, and that he could see them with such quality, in what is suggested to be streamed in real time. Of course today, live streaming is commonplace, and was even before COVID-19. And that sense of isolation and worry of infection seems even more eerily poignant now in the wake of such a devastating pandemic, but especially in the damaging ways that it has affected our ability to connect with one another. This is why Pulse not only succeeds in shocking and terrifying its audience, but does so with even greater efficacy now. There are very rare instances of violence, and those that emerge are often so quickly brought on that the audience is forced to consider for a moment whether what they witnessed really happened; this only adds to the gloom when it becomes clear that they did. As with the dread that has infiltrated our online forums with panicked articles and social media posts--the bread and butter of "doomscrolling"--the sorrow and loneliness that follows becomes our reality, and makes our fears real, even when they're just depressing stories from the internet. The internet becomes our window to the world, and the view looks bleak. The theory about why the ghosts in Pulse are invading our world is that they are lonely and full of despair themselves, and long to inflict this state on those who have not yet died. How different is this from so many online articles and posts that seem compelled not so much to educate us, but draw us into that dreadful vortex of fear and paranoia?
Recommended for: Fans of a chilling supernatural horror story that uses the advent of the internet as a metaphor for the inherent unease and dread that comes from trading actual human interaction for a virtual world. Pulse seems surprisingly prescient in its themes today, and even though moments of violence are spare, the pervading gloom of the movie makes it still best suited to an audience that is comfortable with facing the sorrow and the rampant unease that permeates living in a virtual world.
Pulse was made in an age when the internet was a strange--even supernatural-esque--arena. Just consider how our decade's applications of the internet would look to someone even twenty years ago--like magic or something from a science fiction story. This movie intimates that the internet is also a kind of portal between the overfilled land of the dead and our realm, but there's more to it than that. A later part of the story adds that someone discovered that these overflowing spirits could be contained in structures by sealing them off, apparently with red tape. The only problem is that when the container is breached, the spirits escape and continue to use that room as a kind of "spout" to pour forth from the afterlife and into our world. This way of describing spirits as a kind of dangerous force that is difficult to contain reminds me of various nuclear disasters, like Chernobyl, and their long-term, tragic aftermaths Pulse establishes some "rules" like this for its ghosts, but they are really there because in their own vague way, the answers only offer cold comfort. What seems like an isolated incident with Taguchi quickly spreads like a pandemic, and by the time this explanation surfaces, it becomes clear that it is already too late to stop it. So instead of the answers offering hope, it only adds to the despair, which is a central theme of Pulse. The musical score for this movie by Takefumi Haketa is unlike any I have heard from its contemporaries. It is haunting and chilling, emotional and full of dread; it reminds me of Howard Shore's similarly unnerving scores from movies like The Silence of the Lambs or Scanners. The cinematography by Jun'ichirô Hayashi is also essential in establishing this mood of hopelessness. The camera seems to stare for long periods of time, as if spacing out or deep in contemplation, and is rarely ever moving with any urgency. It lingers on chilling images, be they the worried protagonists or the unsettling specters that emerge from time to time. There are a couple of editing tricks that deal with the ashen shadows that also make it clear that these are the residual souls of Michi's departed friends, and their presence only compounds her grief.
Despite the advances in internet technology by today's standards, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse is a surprisingly forward-thinking movie in the way that it draws a link between how we use the internet as a replacement for human interaction and the loneliness that follows. It's interesting that these videos of people in despair that Ryosuke watches exist on his computer at all, and that he could see them with such quality, in what is suggested to be streamed in real time. Of course today, live streaming is commonplace, and was even before COVID-19. And that sense of isolation and worry of infection seems even more eerily poignant now in the wake of such a devastating pandemic, but especially in the damaging ways that it has affected our ability to connect with one another. This is why Pulse not only succeeds in shocking and terrifying its audience, but does so with even greater efficacy now. There are very rare instances of violence, and those that emerge are often so quickly brought on that the audience is forced to consider for a moment whether what they witnessed really happened; this only adds to the gloom when it becomes clear that they did. As with the dread that has infiltrated our online forums with panicked articles and social media posts--the bread and butter of "doomscrolling"--the sorrow and loneliness that follows becomes our reality, and makes our fears real, even when they're just depressing stories from the internet. The internet becomes our window to the world, and the view looks bleak. The theory about why the ghosts in Pulse are invading our world is that they are lonely and full of despair themselves, and long to inflict this state on those who have not yet died. How different is this from so many online articles and posts that seem compelled not so much to educate us, but draw us into that dreadful vortex of fear and paranoia?
Recommended for: Fans of a chilling supernatural horror story that uses the advent of the internet as a metaphor for the inherent unease and dread that comes from trading actual human interaction for a virtual world. Pulse seems surprisingly prescient in its themes today, and even though moments of violence are spare, the pervading gloom of the movie makes it still best suited to an audience that is comfortable with facing the sorrow and the rampant unease that permeates living in a virtual world.