Pulse (2001)

Ringu's lasting legacy was a spate of Japanese horror films based around modern technology.  Pulse was the first, predating One Missed Call by a couple years.  Director and writer Kiyoshi Kurosawa wanted to cash in by having ghosts attached to the internet in some way but not have his ghost looking like Sadako or all the other stringy-haired female ghosts at the time.  Instead, Kurosawa decided to make his ghosts look like normal people, while the story itself is about normal people becoming ghosts.

Michi Kudo (Kumiko Asô) works in a plant shop with her friends Junko (Kurume Arisaka), Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo) and Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi).  When Taguchi stops coming to work they get concerned.  Michi goes to visit and, after a conversation, Taguchi hangs himself.  Soon she is also seeing similar strange behavior in Yabe, as well as other people around her.  She soon finds out that people are disappearing and not just committing suicide. 

In another part of Tokyo university student Ryosuke (Haruhiko Katô) sets up the internet for the first time and receives a strange transmission about talking to a ghost.  It is followed by a video of a strange room.  Curious, he consults Harue (Koyuki), a woman working in the university's computer lab.  It turns out a grad student has created a program that simulates the danger of living and dead souls connecting, and theorizes that the realm of the dead is finite and, if given the chance, will spill over into the land of the living.  Ryosuke at first refuses to believe, but then begins to experience the phenomenon on his own as he also begins to realize that Tokyo is swiftly becoming a ghost town. 

Pulse is nominally about isolation and depression, something that was (and may still be) gripping Japanese youth in the early 2000s.  The fear was that the internet would further isolate people to the point where they would fade into the background, in fact becoming living ghosts.  Despite the internet angle this isn't hyped up too much throughout.  There are no ghosts crawling out of computers like Sadako does out of a television.  Rather, the internet seems to provide people instructions for building the "forbidden room", a cell often sealed with red tape, that allows the dead to cross.  

The result is that the concurrent stories show a world slowly ending as humanity, spurred on by millions of years of dead ancestors, slowly succumbs to loneliness and either fades away - often to a stain on a wall with a lonely voice saying, "Help me!" - or kill themselves out of desperation.  It is hinted that the dead prefer the former as it doesn't create yet another ghost, but traps their souls on our plane of existence. 

The movie feels like a Japanese version of a David Lynch film.  There are many surreal scenes, long stretches without music but with ambient environmental sound and a slow, deliberate pace.  It's not a movie meant to provide jump scares but, instead, to instill a growing sense of dread in the audience and not make them much more aware of what is going on than the characters.  The performances are geared toward that type of film, with most of the characters, even if they have friends or family they are attached to, all isolated within themselves and their own lives.

This did come out in 2001, and was not a big budget production.  Therefore, it should come as no surprise that, while a number of practical effects work, the CGI isn't great.  I remember the final scenes in Tokyo having much more of an impact when I saw it 20 or so years ago.  Now the flaws are so obvious that it does take some of that away.  However, despite a few issues as the film winds down, it remains one of the best examples of the Japanese horror boom of the time. 

Pulse (2001)

Time: 119 minutes

Starring: Kumiko Asô, Haruhiko Katô, Koyuki, Kurume Arisaka

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa