PULSE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
CAPSULE: The director of CURE brings a weird and very complex concept to the screen. One viewing will not be enough to understand fully the premise of PULSE. The idea is something about ghosts and the Internet. The film has an amazing apocalyptic style. Rating: 7 (0 to 10), +2 (-4 to +4)
Perhaps the most disturbing (and disturbed?) filmmaker in the world is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. His films all seem to have one style, bleak. The worlds he creates are terrifying and cold. Little known in the US to date, his films deliver the kind of horror that so many of our filmmakers promise and are unable to deliver. Most of his ideas are fresh and at the same time morbid. His 1998 film CURE, with one of his niftiest ideas, is just now getting a sadly limited release in the US and hopefully enough people will see it that his name will soon be one to conjure with. CURE is probably his classic. Last year he released SEANCE, a remake of SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. That was perhaps a miscalculation inserting supernatural elements into a non-supernatural story. PULSE is Kurosawa back on form.
Taguchi, a young computer expert, is late with his delivery of some important software. Two co-workers go to his apartment and find it a dismal dark affair in spite of his computer equipment. Taguchi, acting very strangely, lets his friends look for the missing software. Meanwhile he slips behind a plastic curtain. When he fails to respond to calls his friends follow him behind the curtain and discover he has hanged himself. If that was not horror enough the body seems to disappear leaving just a strange dark mildew-like spot on the wall. Taguchi's computer seems to have been infected with some kind of computer virus. People whose computer gets the virus seem superficially to die via suicide. But they are not entirely dead. Their spirits seem to remain present somehow in the real world and on the Internet. People who get the computer virus are asked if they want to see a ghost. If they say yes, they seem to be able to see real time images of the spirits still nearby somehow. The computer shows them impossible images of ghosts in their own rooms as seen from cameras that do not exist. This is all somehow connected to heaven and hell somehow filling up and overflowing "like a computer disk." Instead the dead seem to be staying on earth and inhabiting computer viruses. There is some sort of passage between worlds having something to do with doors marked with red tape and strange electronic disturbances on computers. Leave it to Kurosawa to find a new kind of death.
This is a film that has more weird ideas piled together than LIFEFORCE and somehow Kurosawa makes the film all work. It may not totally convey his message of isolation and its parallels to death, but whatever it does convey is nightmarish. Kurosawa, who directs his own screenplay, ties his story into the real world with some familiar and accurate computer discussion. Frequently the plot is advanced with character hunches being assumed to be fact. His plotting is frequently hard to follow and always very strange.
Junichiro Hayashi, the cinematographer who recently has been doing all of Kurosawa's films, creates a dark, cold, and gloomy tone. Images are obscured by semi-lighting or are behind plastic curtain. Scenes are not milked for their horror the way American exploitation films might. People are shot with guns but there is little if any blood in evidence. Seeing black silhouettes on computer screens is not immediately scary. Kurosawa is not going for and easy visual shock, but a deeper metaphysical dread.
Of any horror filmmaker in the world, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the one to watch. I rate this metaphysical look at isolation a 7 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Copyright 2001 Mark R. Leeper