After watching Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s eerie Pulse, I read a few post-2020 retrospectives on it that argued, elegantly and incisively, that the film’s truest and most lasting horror is how it portrays the kind of suffocating, isolating loneliness that became so widespread during the pandemic. And it’s true that Pulse suffuses its runtime with a sense of that chilling removal, like each character is being slowly and systematically taken out of the world. (Sometimes literally.) While its in-script discourse on loneliness can be both too explicit and too jumbled, its visuals convey the effects of that loneliness very deftly. This is a thoughtful, delicately crafted film with layers of meaning, and I’m not surprised that people found themselves going back to it during quarantine and responding to it even more strongly.
But I’ll be honest, what really sticks with me about Pulse is that there’s a ghost in it who walks in an alarming, stylized way, and then when a man cowers from her and hides behind a chair, you briefly think she’s gone, but then you see her hands curl over the top, and AHHH AHHH AHHH. Also, sometimes someone’s taking a garbage bag off their head, and it takes a little bit longer than you’d think it would, and while this is happening, I feel like I’m going out of my mind with dread.
For all that Pulse is subtle and sophisticated, it is, for me, at its best when it’s playing my nerve endings like a fiddle. It’s horror that offers frequent, genuine, and unnerving scares, and I can’t recommend it highly enough on that front. You are getting incredible fear value for runtime here.
And when the scares aren’t on screen, the movie still gives you plenty to think about. As I said, the visuals are striking–they add brilliantly to the horror, and Kurosawa has the perfect instinct for simplicity: the “forbidden rooms” with their doors taped off in red are perfect. The way the small-scale horror is slowly revealed to be just a sample of a larger apocalypse, the way the thematically sparse sets gradually become diagetically sparse, the way Ryosuke’s hair and costuming instantly and adorably ground him as a particular kind of early 00s guy …. This is good stuff. The emotional heft isn’t there for me, but it clearly is for a lot of other people, and whatever it lacks in feeling (attachment), it more than makes up for in feeling (AHHH GHOST). Watch it, and enjoy spending the rest of the night twitching if you see an unexpected shape out of the corner of your eye.
Pulse is streaming on Prime.
