Pulse

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2001

Pulse (Kairo)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
JAPAN, 2001
118 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Daiei Company Ltd./NTV Network/Hakuhodo/Imagica
Executive Producer: Yasuyoshi Tokuma
Producer: Shun Shimizu, Seiji Okuda, Ken Inoue, Atsuyuki Shimoda
Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cinematographer: Junichiro Hayashi
Editor: Junichi Kikuchi
Production Designer: Tomoyuki Maruo
Sound: Makio Ika
Music: Takefumi Haketa
Principal Cast: Haruhiko Kato, Kumiko Aso, Koyuki, Kurume Arisaka, Masatoshi Matsuo
Production: Daiei Company, Ltd

The masterful bending of genre that has been the hallmark of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s extraordinary career hits a new high note with Pulse. Of its many qualities, one must admire its sheer audacity above all else: Kurosawa has unapologetically chosen to situate his densest and most complex film within the usually low-rent teen horror genre.

Pulse might be described as an Internet ghost story, but that would only give a scant sense of the unsettling ideas in play.

The film comes out of the gate self-aware and smartly referential, like a Japanese take on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Young people know something nasty is going on; its eerie presence is palpable. Soon a young computer analyst is found hanging dead in his apartment. There is what seems to be... electrical discharge? a big black splodge? on the wall. His friends search the apartment—do they see his ghost?? and discover a mysterious floppy disk containing an unusual virus. It may give them a clue to his bizarre suicide. The disk turns up in the hands of a young man eager to get on the Internet to check out some games. It launches a program that appears to present real-time transmissions of people engaged in solitary activities in their apartments—like a boring group webcam site. But there is something not quite right in the appearance and behaviour of these lonely souls... As the film progresses, the seemingly generic horror moments are accompanied by strange disappearances, terrifying rooms sealed in red tape and a hypnotic, totally disturbing, dancing ghost. By its end, the film exists in an emptied world, full of ghosts past and present and an eerie, Tarkovskyesque calm as the remaining kids try to find solace in their lonely existence.

In many ways, Pulse continues Kurosawa’s exploration, begun with Cure, of the loneliness felt by those unanchored by religion (traditional, financial and otherwise), conventional ethics or, ultimately, deep, abiding love (this is his most romantic film, too). But never has the ache of humanity been so powerfully conveyed. These kids are staring down an existential abyss that decides, finally, to swallow them whole. Astonishing cinema.
—Noah Cowan