Review: Pulse

In director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest film, Pulse, the forlorn and over-industrialized kids of Tokyo are not alright. They are fed up with tending greenhouses on building roofs and fighting their way through those peculiar Japanese arcades where the game machines seem to require frantic pummeling. Burdened with a desperate, bleed-to-feel-alive mentality, they increasingly opt to take their own lives, and in doing so, they recede into the ones and zeroes of their computers and become ghosts in the laptop. Once on the other side, they act as ghoulish recruiters, popping up on new computer screens nightly, haunting and hustling new catch into the nets until every jacked-in computer in greater Tokyo is more or less glowing with phantasmal energy. Eventually, all of the dead souls crammed into the cyberspace closet start to bleed out into the world, and Pulse veers away from a traditionally amorphous 'J-horror' plot and moves into the realm of Godard-like farce.

There's an early scene in the film which captures the raw melancholia: a television news broadcaster relates the most insipid human-interest story imaginable, about a message in a bottle that was sent from Japan long ago and is now recovered, thousands of miles away. I suppose the inevitable American remake could match that with something equally soul-killing from the archives of Dateline NBC. But will the American actors be able to pull off that lethargic, stranded personality type that seems so unique to Tokyo life? Will the 22-year old blonde thespian and fifth-in-line-to-play-Spiderman actor who take on the lead roles in the remake bring any of that pressing weight?  The condition of being simultaneously crushed by overcrowding and feeling completely solitary in the universe is proto-Japanese - it's hard to imagine this malady being transplanted to any other culture, let alone ours. Pulse at least takes the time to tinker with this phenomenon, without losing its horror plot.

In settings where you would expect to see a large cast of extras, like a daytime computer classroom, a switchyard, and the arteries of a busy highway, there are very few people; sometimes nothing more than abandoned equipment and littered roads. How can this be Tokyo? Where are all the people? It's part of the attempt by Kurosawa (no relation to the Kurosawa) to tweak the psyche of his Japanese audience on a subconscious level. Plagued by unwanted imagery of suicides, the disappearance of friends and the felt presence of an evil zephyr - the film's opening shot is of a girl turning her face toward a strong ocean wind - the teenage characters must maintain their stoic composure. While they do so, evidence of an even more fundamental rift in their world continues to mount. At one point, when the bizarre happenings can no longer be ignored, one character commands another: "Let's just act normal!"

As a director, Kurosawa is apparently no stranger to bizarre subject matter, or even ghosts and suicide in particular as subjects. His resume is peppered with cheerful titles like Ghost Cop, Barren Illusions, and Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself. For Pulse, he has assembled a handsome cast of Japanese up-and-comers, but the main action of the film is anchored around the one-named actress Koyuki as Harue, the quiet computer nerdette, and Haruhiko Kato as Ryosuke, the aimless flopabout who freaks out when his computer browser starts taking him, unasked, to web pages where grainy suicide videos play over and over. The haunting process is a little complicated, but mainly works like this: After hypnotizing the victim with the grainy hari kari Internet show, the predator ghost cordons off a small room in the real world with red tape - only red tape! - and lures the prey into that room where they commit suicide and are turned into a new Internet ghost. It doesn't feel as complicated on screen as it sounds, thanks to solid direction.

On the other hand, anyone who needs their horror films to be tightly-paced and laugh-heavy may be bored to tears by Pulse; some scenes drag on in dead silence for many minutes at a time, conversations about philosophy are given room to stretch, and all humor has been vacuum-sucked out of the universe. The film is also curiously dated in its display of technology, even though it was released in Japan only four years ago by a hip, youth-centric director. The characters fret over floppy disks, explain the function of the Internet to each other and tip-toe through a snake-pit of wires when leaving their bedrooms. The American remake will no doubt go the complete opposite direction and show us instantly-downloadable television-quality images on solar-powered laptops, or something equally preposterous.

Despite its limitations, there's enough to chew on to make Pulse worthy of a recommendation. The film contains two great scenes: the first involves the seductive haunting of a male student by a spectral geisha who dances in a herky-jerky, unnatural style, as though all her movements were shot in reverse and then played forward. The second scene is a climactic one, where for once all the tedious complications of a J-horror film actually lead to something. One of the characters, having made the mistake of entering one of the red-taped ghosting rooms, emerges, trancelike, with a large handgun. The other characters frantically try to wake her out of her mental cocoon before she can do what she has been commanded to do - kill herself. She stands statue-like, looking off into space as they shout at her to live. In this scene, set against the backdrop of an empty, cavernous hangar, Kurosawa is no doubt speaking directly to his youthful Japanese audience.