Pulse (2001 film)

Pulse (回路) is a 2001 Japanese techno-horror film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. The movie was well-received critically and has a cult following. An English-language remake, also titled Pulse, debuted in 2006 and spawned two sequels. The script was also adapted into a novel of the same name by Kurosawa himself.

Plot
The plot centers on ghosts invading the world of the living via the Internet. It features two parallel plotlines that eventually converge. In the first, Michi Kudo has recently moved to Tokyo and begun working at a shop that sells plants. Her co-workers include Junko Sasano, Toshio Yabe, and Taguchi, who has been missing for several days while working on a computer disk for the shop's sales. Michi goes to Taguchi's apartment and finds him distracted and aloof; while she is looking for the disk, she turns and finds he has hanged himself. His corpse visibly decaying makes her question who she'd been talking to initially. Michi and her friends discover the disk he left behind contains an image of Taguchi staring into his own computer monitor, on which Taguchi staring into his monitor can be seen - creating an endless series of images. In the other monitor on his desk, a ghostly face stares out into Taguchi's room.

Yabe receives a phone call and hears a distorted voice saying "help me". Upon checking his phone, he sees the same image found on Taguchi's disk. He goes to Taguchi's apartment and sees a black stain on the wall where he hanged himself, as well as a paper with "how to make a forbidden room" written on it. He notices a door sealed with red tape and enters it, where he encounters a ghost.

Michi receives a call like the one Yabe got. She goes to check on Yabe and finds a black stain on the wall like the one in Taguchi's apartment. Junko unseals and enters a "forbidden room". Inside, Michi rescues Junko from a ghost. Junko becomes catatonic from the encounter. She later steps toward the wall and becomes a black stain, which then dissolves and scatters. Worried, Michi goes to check on her mother, who lives outside Tokyo.

The second plotline follows Ryosuke Kawashima, a university economics student who has recently signed up to a new internet service provider. His computer accesses a website by itself, showing him disturbing images of people alone in dark rooms exhibiting bizarre behavior. That night, Ryosuke wakes up to find his computer on again with the disturbing images and frantically unplugs it. The next day he visits the university computer lab for answers and meets Harue Karasawa, a post-graduate computer science student, who suggests he either bookmark the page or screen capture the images for her to examine. Ryosuke attempts to do so, but his computer will not follow his commands. Instead, a video plays of a man with his head in a plastic bag, sitting in a room with the words "HELP ME" written all over the walls.

A graduate student explains to Ryosuke his theory that the souls of the dead have begun to invade the physical world. Harue begins acting strangely, suggesting that ghosts would want to trap humans in their own loneliness rather than kill them. Ryosuke tries to escape with her on the train. However, their train stops, and Harue, seized by a desire to go home, returns to her apartment. She witnesses the man with the plastic bag shoot himself on her computer. She then sees a video of herself in the present moment on the screen. As she embraces the invisible figure watching her, Harue, who has alway felt lonely, happily says that she is "not alone". When Ryosuke arrives, she has vanished.

As people begin vanishing in great numbers, evacuations of Tokyo begin, and a full-scale invasion of the Kanto region by the ghosts is underway. Ryosuke meets Michi on his way and they find Harue in an abandoned factory. She takes off the plastic bag on her head and shoots herself, mirroring the man she saw on the computer. When Ryosuke and Michi's car runs out of gas, Ryosuke enters a warehouse to search for fuel, carrying a gas can with him. In the process, he inadvertently walks into a "forbidden room", where he encounters a ghost who tells him that "death was eternal loneliness". Although he tries to resist the ghost's influence, Ryosuke loses the will to live, and Michi drags him to safety. They drive through a deserted, ravaged Tokyo, encountering apocalyptic scenery. After travelling into Tokyo Bay on a motorboat, the pair are found and brought aboard a ship departing from Tokyo, manned by a small group of survivors who tell them that similar events are happening worldwide.

Returning to the first scene of the film, as the ship heads for Latin America, the captain encourages Michi, telling her that she is doing the right thing by continuing to live. She returns to her room, where she sees Ryosuke sitting against the wall with his eyes closed. He fades into a shadow as Michi declares that she has found happiness, being alone with her last friend in the world.

Cast

 * Kumiko Asō as Michi Kudo
 * Haruhiko Kato as Ryosuke Kawashima
 * Koyuki as Harue Karasawa
 * Kurume Arisaka as Junko Sasano
 * Masatoshi Matsuo as Toshio Yabe
 * Shinji Takeda as Yoshizaki
 * Jun Fubuki as Michi's mother
 * Shun Sugata as Boss
 * Kōji Yakusho as Ship Captain
 * Show Aikawa as Employee
 * Kenji Mizuhashi as Taguchi

Release
Pulse was first released in Japan on February 3, 2001, where it was distributed by Toho.

Distant Horizon purchased worldwide distribution rights to the film from Daiei. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at the Cannes Film Festival.

Home video
The film was released on DVD by Magnolia Home Entertainment on February 21, 2006. Arrow Video published Blu-ray release of the film in July 2017.

As of October 2019, it is included as part of the subscription service run by the BFI.

Critical reception
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 76% based on 55 reviews, and a rating average of 6.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "A sinister spine-tingling techno-thriller whose artistry lies in the power of suggestion rather than a barrage of blood and guts or horror shop special effects".

AllMovie praised the film, writing: "The first 30 minutes of Kairo is perhaps some of the most unnerving, frightening sequences to come down the pike in a long time". Anita Gates of The New York Times wrote: "There are very few moments in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's fiercely original, thrillingly creepy horror movie that don't evoke a dreamlike dread of the truly unknown". Slant gave the film four stars out of four: "Kurosawa's movies have a genuinely unnerving effect on the viewer because they deal with the kind of loneliness that exists in an overcrowded world. [...] Pulse is his strongest elucidation of this theme, treating the World Wide Web as a literal snare forging sinewy connections between strangers where the ultimate destination is chaos". The Guardian called it "an incredibly creepy horror film" that, in the same way as Ring, "finds chills in the most dingy and mundane of locales; skillful deployment of grisly little moments and disturbing, cryptic imagery produce the requisite mood of dread and gloom". Film Threat wrote: "What's worse than a horror film that frightens you sleepless is one that disturbs you to depression". The Washington Post commented: "Pulse is best enjoyed if it's not questioned too closely. It lives visually in a way it cannot live intellectually".

Entertainment Weekly was critical of the film, writing: "watching Pulse [...] you could almost die of anticipation", commenting that "nothing in the two snail-paced hours [...] makes close to a shred of sense". The Seattle Times criticized the film's storyline and length, writing "while it's rattling your nerves, Pulse leaves your brain wanting more", and The Village Voice called the film "at least half an hour too long".

In 2012, Jaime N Christley of Slant listed the film as one of the greatest of all time. In the early 2010s, Time Out conducted a poll with several authors, directors, actors and critics who have worked within the horror genre to vote for their top horror films. The film was ranked as number 65 on the 2020 version of the same list.

The scene where Yabe encounters a ghost for the first time has received attention for being especially frightening without using jump scares or loud sound effects; Scott Tobias, writing for The A.V. Club, described it as "arguably the signature sequence in all of J-horror".