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| From https://i.jeded.com/i/pulse-kairo.11479.jpg |
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Screenwriter: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cast: Kumiko Aso (as Michi Kudo);
Haruhiko Kato (as Ryosuke Kawashima); Koyuki (as Harue Karasawa); Kurume
Arisaka (as Junko Sasano); Masatoshi Matsuo (as Toshio Yabe)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #36
After witnessing so many horror
films with constant, badly done jump scares and bombastic music ruining the
tension, there's what would be an absolutely breathtaking change for me to see Pulse again, and how meditative in mood
it is in vast contrast to other horror films from the time, if it wasn't
inherently more disturbing here for me. Where in having a ghost merely appear
onscreen and wait patiently in the background, or a phone call where the words
"Help me" is spoken in the politest way is heard has more fear to it
because it represents a sense that the ghosts have no need to chase people,
merely to haunt them. Neither is it a fake sense of time of the first Paranormal Activity (2007), which fast
forwarded to the scare between shots of people sleeping, but a prolonged sense
of time passing where you have to wait and feel the scenes completely. Quite soon
into Pulse ghosts or supernatural
sights constantly appear but the ethereal pace makes it acceptable, the hauntings
unsettling more having to feel the length of scenes continue over longer than
in other horror films.
Pulse's plot is quite an expressionist one as it goes along, adding
to this nature, where the cause of the ghosts infecting the real world is clear
(the internet) but the implications are wider and more difficult for us and the
characters to understand. About the internet becoming possessed by the ghosts
of the dead, causing people to commit suicide and others to simply disappears
on mass, the events of Pulse are
vague with a deliberate obscurity with two separate protagonists having rationalise
a strange apocalyptic circumstance. Kudo Michi (Kumiko Aso), who is unfortunate to have discovered a friend's body
after he's hung himself, who with her friends investigates a computer program
he had only to be pulled into the increasingly paranormal occurrences taking
place in Tokyo around them. Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato), a laidback economics student who naively invests
into learning how to access the internet, only for his computer to become possessed,
turning on and off through its own will and taking him to a site with a person
with a black bag over their head and asking if he would like to meet a ghost. The
resulting narrative leaves a great deal to be guessed, from titbits brought in
as events become worse and the population starts to vanish leaving empty
streets.
Mythology of rooms barricaded
with red construction appear where, if entered, leads to the witnesses to be
doomed, playing on the idea of temptation as these rooms start to appear in
greater numbers, naturally in areas isolated that would normally never be of
interest except for the visceral colour of red tape, a bold colour in a film
with an exceptionally (and intentionally) dank palette. The notion of death is
unsettling in this film in general where the victims eventually become a mere
black stain where they vanish or killed themselves, whilst screens on computers
show apparitions in their rooms flickering in and out of reality in utter
isolation, a disturbing sense of despair felt throughout as these figures and
victims connect by the internet but are stuck in their own hells asking for
help. Pulse is even able to get away
with a exposition dump in the middle of its running time as a result, from a
character only seen a few times, who explains the afterlife has ran out of room
for the dead and they've spilt into the living world, because its merely a potential
reason for the seismic events happening, two characters eventually left to
follow as they're stuck with witnessing the end taking place not with a bang
but with a whimper. The result is more troubling and disturbing in what is not
witnessed, and also in what is merely matter-of-fact. The most disturbing
moment of the film is not a chase scene or blood being split, but a character
witnessing a ghost the other side of a claustrophobic room appear in a vague
form, like a memory fading, only for them to be able to be touched, and to be
able to stare someone down with clearly defined eyes and rationally tell them
of their reality.
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| From http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1do4uUGfK1qay58d.jpg |
The metaphors of computers
alienating people is openly discussed, a character calling the connection
between people online a fallacy. What's more clearer now the computer
technology shown is vastly outdated is a greater sense of general ennui about post-post-modernism,
the moment after the Millennium as digital technology advanced where a sense of
great disconnect from other people would be felt more. Considering how the
image of Japan as a technology hub is actually more complicated than Westerners
may presume - cutting edge technological advances but barring mobile phones many
people having never used a computer still - - there's a greater emotional register where
modern life and how it drains people becomes literal, becoming black ash as
they feel the only emotionally connection in their lives to the undead and
their invisible eyes, cameras showing people on their own computer screens from
behind that are entirely invisible to us the viewer when one such victim
cradles it lovingly.
The aesthetic look is vital for
this, great and naturally lit drab urban centres and places where, even in the
open, the lifelessness before people vanish is suffocating. A once full
amusement arcade, for example, when its empty is a place of machines, from a Street Fighter II cabinet to coin
games, merely making noise and bright colours without need for human figures to
play them, useless in context of no one being within the environment. As with
another Japanese work from the same era, the animated series Serial Experiment Lain (1998) where
computers are giant room consuming entities where people can literally enter
the internet through, the basic metaphors can be amplified for a more profound
notion of the anxieties people had for centuries of disconnect enforced even
more now people can communicate through wireless tech without being in the same
room. The sense of bleakness is felt through the atmosphere of the almost grey
or white rooms and industrial warehouses of the world around the characters, adding
a greater sense of a complete lack of connection between people which takes on
apocalyptic implications.
The apocalyptic notion is briefly
seen near the end, empty streets and a burn-out car minimalist examples, the
mere snippets enough to affect the viewer. The only real flaw with Kurosawa's perfectly disturbing work is
the early use of CGI, mainly for one single moment near the end of a burning
airplane falling out of the sky, a little blemish on a film whose elusive
nature is not necessarily obtuse but a lingering, palpable sense of dread
matched by uncomfortable scares which drag out. The rest is more carefully put
together - the ghost boy inexplicably found in a library who merely stands and
looks from a corner of an aisle, a chair or two following a person in a
computer room, a ghostly woman tripping and regaining her balance to go after
someone slowly in mere strides - little details which become more terrifying as
the ghosts are not interested in pursuing their victims or being frantic, but
merely appearing anything and effecting a person in their mere prescience. Pulse as a result is a horror film of a
great, terrible future as depict in a carefully controlled, quiet fright.
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| From http://basementrejects.com/wp-content/ uploads/2012/12/kairo-pulse-ghost.jpg |
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