I have a pretty ecumenical take on horror. I don’t want to limit it to specific forms or subject matter, because that’s boring and if you want that, there are plenty of professional critics happy to pigeonhole horror films as films that provide shocks and jump scares and gore and nothing else. Like I said, boring. I find jump scares and gore, by themselves, boring. At their best, horror films are just as capable of grappling with questions of human nature and experience as any drama, they just paint those questions with a broader palette, and one that tends toward shadows. Some critics want to call those films “elevated horror,” mostly because they can’t bring themselves to admit that horror films can be art too. But that’s an artificial distinction. Horror is just horror. Some of it (a lot of it) is derivative, pandering dreck, but at its best, it examines the human condition.
Kairo (Pulse) is a great example of this. It’s a glacially paced story about the loneliness and alienation of the modern world and the role that technology plays in it, and though over-long, it proceeds with the chilly inevitability of a nightmare.
The film follows two different storylines in parallel. In one, Michi - an employee at a plant nursery - is tasked with tracking down her coworker Taguchi, who has been working on a program that would allow them to track their sales more efficiently. He hasn’t shown up for work in several days. Elsewhere, university student Ryosuke is trying to set up internet access from an ISP installer disk. Once he’s done, his web browser navigates to a page on its own - a page displaying image after image of people sitting alone in dark rooms, barely moving or speaking. One of the figures looks up at him. Spooked, Ryosuke turns off his computer and unplugs it. Elsewhere, Michi finds Taguchi at his apartment. He’s acting distant, moving and speaking slowly, and doesn’t seem to respond when Michi asks him for the disk he was supposed to have. Left to her own devices, Michi goes searching through his stuff, eventually finding the disk.
When she turns around, Taguchi has hung himself. He appears to have been dead for some time.
At Ryosuke’s place, in the middle of the night, his computer turns itself back on, displaying the same site as before. Shadows, sitting in the dark.
This film is part of the late 90s-early 2000s run of Japanese horror films that have come to be known collectively as “J-horror,” and it’s got very much the same aesthetic as other films from this period. It takes place in a gray, overcast Japan, in concrete apartment buildings permanently stained by rain. There’s very little music (just the occasional tasteful sting to punctuate startling moments) and even less background noise, making this an uneasily quiet film. This works to its advantage as a film about isolation, and along with pacing that could generously be described as deliberate, the result is somehow both dreamy and nightmarish. It’s a languid, chilly story full of eerie, obliquely creepy moments that proceed from a visual vocabulary with an internal logic, like any nightmare where you aren’t sure exactly what’s happening, but you know that whatever it is, it is evil and wrong and coming for you with a mindless implacability. It’s cryptic, but not so cryptic that you can’t follow what’s going on. The film has atmosphere in spades, it doesn’t yank your attention toward the scary bits, instead trusting you to follow what’s going on. It doesn’t need to make a lot of noise because the silence is even worse, and the result is very effective at keeping the audience uncomfortable and priming them for the big moments.
But this approach comes with some problems - the film’s just shy of two hours long, and you feel every second of it. I don’t mind slow movies, especially ones so committed to building a sense of inescapable dread, but this really could have had about 15 minutes or so trimmed without, I think, harming the overall result. There were points where I felt my attention starting to wander because the silence and stillness was tipping over into stasis. Any film that relies on the existence of the internet to drive its premise is going to risk looking dated, and though it’s mostly relegated to the background once things really get going, there’s still something that feels dated in how unfamiliar most of the characters are with how computers work in even the most basic way. Ryosuke bears the brunt of this as a young college student who manages to know almost nothing about consumer-grade computers or software. And sure, this film was made during a period when not everyone knew much about computers (and long before haptic devices like smartphones or tablets), but to modern eyes, he just looks…kinda dumb, in a way that I don’t think was intentional. I appreciate that not everything is explained into the ground (the next person who tells me that they’re going to explore the “lore” of some antagonist from a horror film is getting a very metaphorical foot up their ass), but if you look at what’s supposed to be happening a little too closely, it does seem kind of shapeless and hand-wavey. But this is a pretty minor complaint for a film that sets a tone, commits to it, and ends in impressively bleak fashion.
This is also one of a number of Japanese horror films that got American remakes, and I think I’m going to start doing some compare-and-contrasts, because I think there’s some space between the culturally specific concerns of films like this and the way they get translated for audiences in the U.S. that’s worth talking about. But I suspect any remake is going to have a hard time replicating this film’s monolithic sense of depression and isolation, as much as I’d like to see someone try.
IMDB entry
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