Search - Pulse on DVD

Watch this version, not the remake

A. Smith | Latham, NY | 09/12/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I saw the American remake first and was put off the idea of an original. Friends talked me into getting a copy (thank you) and as usual the original film is far and away the better version.



A very disturbing film about ghosts, technology, internet despair, loneliness, and the collapse of society.



Fascinating that special effects can be sparse, but you can have the wits scared out of you by one good professional contortionist. The movie does a great job of playing into visual and auditory notions of right and wrong."

Very impressive indeed, the work of a genuine talent.

Rob | Oxford, UK | 03/25/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is an excellent Japanese horror movie. It's thoughtful, creepy, unsettling & very well directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi. On the one hand you have your standard urban horror themes of loneliness & technology-as-villain (in this case computers & the net). On the other there's this speculation about what might be waiting for us 'on the other side.' Is death, as one of the characters wonders aloud at one point, a chance to be reunited with loved ones & so no longer endure the day to day loneliness of life? But as things turn out, being dead is just as miserable & painful an experience for the ghosts as being alive is for the human characters, something Kurosawa demonstrates in a number of genuinely unsettling sequences.



Kiyoshi has an excellent & mature style - demonstrating a preference for long takes (a style that'll drive impatient teen horror fans up the wall) & shocks achieved within the frame rather than through flashy editing. Two sequences epitomise this - in one a young woman searches an apartment for her co-worker in vain while a shadowy figure rises silently from a chair at the back of the room behind her. It might not sound terribly creepy but honestly I think my heart skipped a beat when that happened. In the other - & this is undoubtedly one of the films most talked about moments - a woman jumps to her death & the camera unblinkingly records her fall & impact with no cutting away.



But don't get the idea this is some J-horror gorefest because it isn't. What's so refreshing for me about 'Pulse' is that rather than harping on gore & shocks for two hours the director takes the time to lay out an intriguing story. One in which ghosts are flooding back into our world because there's no more room in theirs. The only trouble being that when ghosts & real people come into physical contact with each other neither can survive (the humans leave behind a smudgy blackened residue which recalls the blast shadows of Hiroshima victims).



Throughout Pulse Kurosawa balances the increasingly apocalyptic imagery of a hi-tech Tokyo in which life has all but ceased with an insistently humanist theme. Our characters clearly care for each other & the story culminates with a small group of survivors setting sail toward an uncertain future. Meanwhile the heroine of the story comes to realise that having found a temporary happiness with the young student who helped her escape she now has the strength to go on.



I'd like to think that's really what Kurosawa is getting at here. Not for him the simple scares of a ghost story, nor the fashionable sense of nihilism (hey, we're all doomed!) which so appeals to moody teens, but the message that in life the small bonds we make with each other, those passing moments of happiness & kindness, these are what shield us from loneliness & enable us to keep going in an unforgiving universe. Seen that way it makes for an appropriate visual metaphor that the final shot of Pulse is a stunning birds-eye view of a tiny shipful of humanity adrift in a vast ocean.



I look forward to seeing more films by Kurosawa Kiyoshi.



One last point: a sequence in Pulse depicts a jetliner seen from street level falling out of the sky & crashing into a building. On the DVD featurette there's a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a location recce for this particular scene. The date? June 2000. Talk about prophetic."