The Cinematheque

“[J‑horror’s] last statement and its one masterpiece.”

Alvin Lu, Film Comment

The disquieting idea advanced in Pulse, that the afterlife is at capacity, cradles an altogether existential meditation on loneliness in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s turn-of-the-millennium masterpiece, probably the summit of the technophobic zeitgeist in Japanese horror. Here, the internet is a superspreader of despair, a plague that appeals to the dead’s insatiable appetite for companionship; the web, it turns out, is a porous membrane between worlds. Kurosawa choreographs the escalating invasion (and it does escalate) with a remarkable grasp of what truly instills fear. That the sight of red tape can carry such gut-dropping dread is a testament to the director’s command over what can be rendered scary. The characters, a cohort of plant-shop employees and college students, uncover the supernatural goings-on—some succumbing to the sadness along the way. Few horror films of the era offer such clear indication of an auteur not only elevating their own craft but the genre’s.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“Where the average Japanese horror flick is petulant and nasty, Pulse is dolorous, shivery, and surreal.”

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

“It’s a film for those who believe that ideas are scarier than severed limbs, that art and horror aren’t such strange bedfellows; the first film worth all of the J‑horror hype, trumping its peers in artistic value and scare-counts while engaged in a radical rethinking of what terror really is.”

Matthew Plouffe, Reverse Shot