Silencio
11-10-2007, 03:15 AM
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What most Hollywood mainstream "horror" films lack (including the 2006 remake of this very film) is a sense of subtlety. Too often they throw away plot, character development, and meaning in place of cheap scares that only momentarily entice the audience, mostly out of surprise and shock. Well, enter Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a man who knows how to turn the mundane into the profoundly frightening, and has the technical ability to use the smallest amount of technical effects to produce the largest, most affecting outcomes.
From the get-go, Pulse is a meditative, plot-wise minimalistic, tonally mysterious film whose atmosphere doesn't break throughout the entire two-hour running time. After one of their friends commits suicide, a group of twenty-somethings, nestled in the heart of metropolitan Tokyo, set out to uncover the odd occurrences that the death brings about. They receive mysterious phone calls from "strangers" who beg for help, and begin to see odd shadows on the walls of their homes, with an explanation nowhere in sight. Shortly after, we switch the focus to a young, free-living teen whose about to get his first taste of the internet. Once he's finished dialing up a connection, a strange website pops up, inviting the viewer to watch a set of "ghosts" randomly moving about in your everyday living spaces. From hereon in, the film becomes a race of survival for the group of young survivors who gradually discover that the dead are communicating to them through technology, and are hell-bent to isolate the world in utter despair and loneliness.
In the end, Pulse is a treatise, a giant metaphor on the evasiveness of ever-evolving technology. It begs the questions, will we go insofar as to isolate our very existence and render ourselves incommunicable to the point where we can't differentiate the living from the dead? Pulse sure as hell thinks so. It's no surprise then, that on more than one occasion, a character speaks of not being able to tell the "ghosts" apart from the living, or how an abandoned factory becomes a common set-piece in the film, illustrating the evolution from our once man-made resources to a world where we rely on robotics and machinery to fulfill our most dire needs. But Kiyoshi Kurosawa's main concern is on us, the people, and the loss of understanding and interdependence that technology, and particularly the invention of the internet, has brought about. In one scene, a character remarks about how he sought out the internet to meet people, to which the other replies, "people don't really connect, you know, we all live separately". And truer words couldn't summarize Kurosawa's leading intent and themes. At the end of the day, we're all waiting to connect, to relate to at least one other person, so that our banal existence on this planet doesn't feel so lonely and wasted. It's only appropriate that in the climax and closing moments of the film, complete strangers bond together in unison and familiarity. Not out of love, lust, or compassion, but because we humans need and depend on each other. Consider this exchange in one of the film's best scenes:
Girl: "Where did everyone go?"
Boy: "I'm here. I'm here beside you. Even if there's no one else, it doesn't matter. We are both definitely here."
But aside from all the thematic mumbo-jumbo, Pulse is also a terrific mood piece of frightening and suspenseful proportions. Kurosawa uses lighting and shadows to his full advantage, creating creepy scenes where the camera lingers on the open space of a darkly-lit room, slightly obscuring the dominating object, until something moves in the background, and a few seconds later, is up close to the screen, with the viewer never expecting any of it. Like mentioned earlier, Kurosawa knows to how to make the mundance into something unique. He resorts from exploiting his audience with shoddy sound effects and cheap scares, instead opting for the quietly disturbing, creating some of the most unsettling horror imagery in recent memory. Kudos to the wonderful young cast who breathe life into their characters in this unnerving, languid, profoundly moving descent into post-apocalyptic human isolation by way of 21st century technology.
What most Hollywood mainstream "horror" films lack (including the 2006 remake of this very film) is a sense of subtlety. Too often they throw away plot, character development, and meaning in place of cheap scares that only momentarily entice the audience, mostly out of surprise and shock. Well, enter Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a man who knows how to turn the mundane into the profoundly frightening, and has the technical ability to use the smallest amount of technical effects to produce the largest, most affecting outcomes.
From the get-go, Pulse is a meditative, plot-wise minimalistic, tonally mysterious film whose atmosphere doesn't break throughout the entire two-hour running time. After one of their friends commits suicide, a group of twenty-somethings, nestled in the heart of metropolitan Tokyo, set out to uncover the odd occurrences that the death brings about. They receive mysterious phone calls from "strangers" who beg for help, and begin to see odd shadows on the walls of their homes, with an explanation nowhere in sight. Shortly after, we switch the focus to a young, free-living teen whose about to get his first taste of the internet. Once he's finished dialing up a connection, a strange website pops up, inviting the viewer to watch a set of "ghosts" randomly moving about in your everyday living spaces. From hereon in, the film becomes a race of survival for the group of young survivors who gradually discover that the dead are communicating to them through technology, and are hell-bent to isolate the world in utter despair and loneliness.
In the end, Pulse is a treatise, a giant metaphor on the evasiveness of ever-evolving technology. It begs the questions, will we go insofar as to isolate our very existence and render ourselves incommunicable to the point where we can't differentiate the living from the dead? Pulse sure as hell thinks so. It's no surprise then, that on more than one occasion, a character speaks of not being able to tell the "ghosts" apart from the living, or how an abandoned factory becomes a common set-piece in the film, illustrating the evolution from our once man-made resources to a world where we rely on robotics and machinery to fulfill our most dire needs. But Kiyoshi Kurosawa's main concern is on us, the people, and the loss of understanding and interdependence that technology, and particularly the invention of the internet, has brought about. In one scene, a character remarks about how he sought out the internet to meet people, to which the other replies, "people don't really connect, you know, we all live separately". And truer words couldn't summarize Kurosawa's leading intent and themes. At the end of the day, we're all waiting to connect, to relate to at least one other person, so that our banal existence on this planet doesn't feel so lonely and wasted. It's only appropriate that in the climax and closing moments of the film, complete strangers bond together in unison and familiarity. Not out of love, lust, or compassion, but because we humans need and depend on each other. Consider this exchange in one of the film's best scenes:
Girl: "Where did everyone go?"
Boy: "I'm here. I'm here beside you. Even if there's no one else, it doesn't matter. We are both definitely here."
But aside from all the thematic mumbo-jumbo, Pulse is also a terrific mood piece of frightening and suspenseful proportions. Kurosawa uses lighting and shadows to his full advantage, creating creepy scenes where the camera lingers on the open space of a darkly-lit room, slightly obscuring the dominating object, until something moves in the background, and a few seconds later, is up close to the screen, with the viewer never expecting any of it. Like mentioned earlier, Kurosawa knows to how to make the mundance into something unique. He resorts from exploiting his audience with shoddy sound effects and cheap scares, instead opting for the quietly disturbing, creating some of the most unsettling horror imagery in recent memory. Kudos to the wonderful young cast who breathe life into their characters in this unnerving, languid, profoundly moving descent into post-apocalyptic human isolation by way of 21st century technology.