Blog From The Bench

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) is one of those rare and rewarding directors who you have to work hard at being a fan of. His films are multilayered, intertexual, complex, deep and genre-bending; but almost universally strange and alienating to the point of being, well, kind of annoying. David Lynch does kind of the same kind of thing, but Kurosawa does it on a really, really low budget, and in an extremely Japanese sort of way. He is one of my personal favorite filmmakers currently working in film today, but I admit that his material is often frustratingly oblique to appreciate, let alone describe to the curious.

Part of the Japanese horror revival spawned by Ringu in the late 1990s, Kairo aka. Pulse was esoteric auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s (Bright Future, Cure, Charisma) contribution to the newly created “technological anxiety” horror genre; a downright disconcerting thriller about the isolating nature of modern technology and the alienating affect it has on human interaction.

Another in a long, never-ending string of Japanese horror remakes, Pulse is scheduled be remade in 2006 for a North American audience (groan) but thankfully, Magnolia Pictures has been kind enough to scoop up the original for distribution in late February, which will no doubt delight us Kurosawa fans previously forced to turn to questionable sources on eBay to add it to our shelves. We received an advance screener, which is pretty neat considering the film is still playing theatrically in select cities, but probably not reflective of the final product on DVD.

A group of young friends are shocked by the sudden and unexpected suicide of one of their friends. When they examine a floppy disc in his apartment that he had been working on before he died, they are disconcerted to find eerie photographs of the deceased friend reflected in improbable locations. Things take a turn for the worse when the computers began dialing out into the internet unexpectedly, loading bizarre websites asking viewers if they wish to see ghosts. The strange lurching figures seem to peer out from behind the florescent glow of computer monitors, as if beckoning to escape upon the world.

The friends become convinced that their friend is trying to contact them from beyond the grave, but as the ghostly epidemic increases in intensity, they become fearful for their sanities. Everyone who encounters these odd ghostly figures in their computers seem to be driven to suicide… and the city is rapidly becoming exposed…

There is much to like in Pulse for first-time viewers, especially for those who failed to connect to the string of recent Japanese horror films like Ringu, Dark Water and Ju-On (and their ubiquitous and boring North American remakes that followed). Less concerned with being a horror film, Kurosawa instead pounds feelings of anxiety, isolation and loneliness into a framework of a technological thriller more David Cronenberg than Wes Craven or Sam Raimi.

Pulse is full of people who fail to communicate with one another in any shape or form, a group of friends in name only who seem unwilling or unable to form meaningful connections with one another. Dialogue is minimal, because there is no talking to be had between people. They are seldom on-screen together with one another, and when they are, they are usually anxious and sullen. During one sequence, a news broadcast runs in the background about a message in a bottle washing up on the shores of Malaysia, four thousand kilometers and ten years after it was sent by a ten-year old Japanese boy. The boy, interviewed on TV, seems incredulous that his message made it to a foreign country. Communication, in any shape or form, is not something that happens easily in Pulse.

Kurosawa is less interested in creating a technological menace that can come into our lives and destroy us, and more interested in exploring the notion that this may have already happened; that technology has fundamentally altered our abilities to communicate to one another, and how isolated and broken we become when we lose contact with the technology. Watch how insane people get when their e-mail goes down in an office building, and you get a glimmer of the truth Kurosawa hopes to illuminate. Out of these anxieties come the ghosts in the machine, as it were, in the form of a web site that connects to your computer and asks you if you want to see what a ghost looks like. The ghosts, once they get in, haunt the screens of their human inhabitants, driving them to suicide, and worse.

Genuinely scary, atmospheric and creepy, Pulse is as complex as it is disconcerting, and sure to delight those who do not mind putting the work into appreciating it. I am pleased as punch to add this one into my ever-growing Kurosawa collection.

To everyone else, be warned: if slow-moving psychological films give you the screaming heebie-jeebies, you will no doubt be better served by the North American remake due out in 2006, which I expect will pasteurize out all the elements that make Pulse a fascinating and rewarding film… leaving behind yet another puerile Ring rip-off – scary stuff indeed. Brr.