Pulse

Wednesday 21 May at 7.30pm

Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Japan | 2001 | 114 mins | R13 violence, horror scenes & content may disturb

The ghosts are literally in the machine in this innovative and prophetic Y2K-era horror flick portraying an interconnected world haunted by the dread of loneliness.

“The most horrifying thing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s fiercely original, thrillingly creepy Pulse (released as Kairo, or Circuit, in Japan) is the way the ghosts move… The story begins at Sunny Plant Sales in Tokyo, where workers are worried about Taguchi, a colleague who owes them a computer disk for a project… One employee, Michi (Kumiko Aso), goes to his apartment to check on him. One minute, Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi) seems fine; the next he has hanged himself… As suicide becomes epidemic, and people start disappearing at a disturbing rate… theories are offered. One is that the mysterious ‘other side’ has finite capacity and suffers from overcrowding. Dead people may be oozing out and entering our world. Or maybe ‘ghosts and people are the same,’ as a computer-lab worker says. All good horror stories are metaphors, and this is one for the painful isolation of contemporary life, but with a literal and chilling proposition: maybe death does not bring welcome oblivion. Maybe, one character suggests, it brings ‘eternal loneliness’ instead.”—Anita Gates, NY Times