Pulse (Kairo) (2001)

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Pulse (Kairo) (2001) – K. Kurosawa

I return to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s tale of dread more often than many other J-Horror films from two decades ago. Sure, it is dated – just one look at the Windows operating system or mobile phones tells you that – but its themes are still universal (if running particularly deep in Japan). After a brief opening on the open sea with Captain Kôji Yakusho (a foreshadow of the film’s end), we meet Michi (Kumiko Asô) and Junko (Kurume Arisaka) who work in a garden store and are concerned about one of their co-workers who hasn’t shown up to work for a while. When Michi visits him, he abruptly commits suicide – and then disappears, leaving only a black mark on the wall and some weird images on his computer. Next, we meet Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô) who is interested in learning about the internet – and lands on a website that asks, “Would you like to meet a ghost?” (the film’s tagline); he quickly shuts down the computer and seeks help from the university’s computer lab, staffed by Harue (Koyuki). Eventually, these two pairs of young people discover “the forbidden room” – entered by a doorway edged by red tape and possessed of some creepy dead souls. In fact, there may be more than one forbidden room; a grad student argues that too many people have died since the start of time and now the souls are seeping back into our world, particularly in these isolated places. But it is the living who seem to be suffering from loneliness and isolation just as much as these lonely dead and that is Kurosawa’s key theme; perhaps he was prescient in pointing to the (then incipient) internet as a wellspring of alienation rather than connection. Yet, as the world falls apart – and the apocalypse is not far off here – the survivors are those who manage to overcome their insecurities and team up.  But getting to this conclusion requires viewers to endure some really creepy scenes.