By Brian Hu
After the theatrical releases of Ringu and its imitators, America is finally ready for Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 masterpiece Pulse, to me the greatest entry of the recent Asian ghost horror cycle. Kurosawa is one of the world's most daring genre filmmakers, and here he takes the basic form and conventions of the Asian horror and spins them into an artful (and spectacularly freaky) meditation on loneliness, death, and technology.
The film's American distributor Magnolia Pictures has been advertising the film as an adult, psychological horror “eschewing gore and easy shocks.” Such a claim gives Pulse the distinction of high seriousness it deserves, but it really doesn't go far enough to describe the sophistication to which Kurosawa uncompromisingly disturbs our expectations of the genre. While the visual and sonic style is constantly innovative and impressive, I was most blown away by the way Kurosawa tweaks the genre on the level of narrative. The typical horror films tend to posit a puzzle to be solved: the appearance or possible appearance of ghosts forces the traumatized young victims to scramble for an exorcism or escape. In these films, there are “experts,” be they occultists, professors, or religious people. The victims in these films become heroes when they work with these experts to determine the best solution, all while overcoming some personal problems (taking care of kids; working; dealing with romantic issues).
In Pulse, there are no experts, and those who claim to be experts will ultimately be wrong. The victims are hardly heroic; they're not written with much exposition, and while one could thus accuse the film of two-dimensional characters, the “everyday” quality of these anonymous youngsters makes the film more ambiguous, more deceptive, and infinitely more terrifying. As the film drifts into its apocalyptic finale, we surrender any hope that the characters can piece together the puzzle (ghostly images on computer screens, shadowy figures on walls, screams for help emanating from seemingly nowhere) and recognize that the terror will prevail under its own unrevealed logic. This strategy insures that the film is scary from beginning to end, as the “heroes” are doomed to be helpless against the ghosts and that the only anxiety they can resolve are those of their own lives as disillusioned Tokyo youth.
A reason why Pulse refuses to give any authoritative explanation for the ghostly images is that it smartly wants to question our assumptions about film ghosts to begin with. Perhaps ghosts are not out to terrorize us. Or perhaps they are. Perhaps they're simply regular people, stuck in the limbo of loneliness extending into the afterlife. All of these possibilities blur the line between ghosts and human beings, and during the troubling final moments, we wonder if maybe we're all already ghosts, controlled by our televisions and computers. That realization isn't conveyed in an “ah-ha” finale which flips everything around 180 degrees a la The Sixth Sense or The Others, but instead, we're never exactly sure what to think even as the film toys with us. Which leaves us a little jaded, certain only that there's still a lot we don't or can't know. Like the ending to Kurosawa's great Bright Future, the final moments of Pulse opens up a whole new set of questions, yet they make total sense under the logic of the film, which is to constantly burrow holes in our numbing expectations of genre and cinema.
Stylistically, Pulse is on the cutting edge of film horror. Kurosawa's use of sound and silence is unparalleled. While there are the expected waves of musical manipulation -- the orchestra playing a few sadistic bars whenever the camera looms a little too long over shadows hanging behind the characters -- there's never buildup to the music. It just lulls up unexpectedly to its own manic momentum. Once in a while, Kurosawa also employs Godard's trick of stopping the music midstream to break the comfortable rhythm and catch us off guard.
However, the use of silence is probably what I'll remember most about the film's style. Often -- although not too frequently as to become predictable -- Kurosawa will suddenly strip out the entire soundtrack, including the music, the sound effects, and perhaps even the “white noise.” For example, in an early scene, a group of young workers look at a mysterious image on a computer screen. There's something they can't quite make out: is it an object? A face? They decide to blow up the photo to see it up close. As the blurry image goes into an extreme close-up, the soundtrack goes silent. Each subsequent cut closer is accompanied by only silence so that we lack the comfort of music and sound as we're zoomed closer to what seems to be a blurry, spectral image of a head. In another example, the sound is stripped away during an encounter with a ghost. What we ultimately hear are the sounds of the audience members in the theater, tossing uncomfortably and making squeaking noises in their seats. I was reminded of avant-garde composer John Cage's innovative “4'33,” where the absence of music highlights the sounds of the world we live in. In Pulse, Kurosawa exploits the nervous noises of the audience to build tension and atmosphere to unthinkable highs.
Kurosawa also has fun manipulating color to suggest a certain unbalance in the world. The film starts off mostly in low-contrast beiges and off-whites, lensed with a soft, almost blurry, texture. As the film progresses and we think we know a little bit more about what's going on, Kurosawa throws in bright, contrasting reds throughout the frame. We start to figure out that red is prophetic of something terrifying, as with the red masking tape lining doorways that lead to unthinkable horrors. Soon we notice the reds everywhere: a bright red chair in the background, a ghostly figure with a red apron, red shoes, red wires hanging from ceilings. An “expert” on ghosts wears a red jacket and a traumatized victim wears a red dress. The scariest aspect of these crimson clues is that they don't follow the logic of any “explanation” for the ghosts given so far in the film, yet the sheer visceral intensity of the bright red objects within an otherwise dull, beige world has far more power to get our blood pumping.
Pulse is a film about the uncertainties underlying technology's promises. The internet is supposed to bring people together, yet everyone feels lonely and disconnected after using it. One of the film's primary fears is that if we can see images of others via the internet, perhaps others can see us too. Worse yet, perhaps they can manipulate and control us as well. As in many of his other films, Kurosawa is uneasy about technology in a society doomed with loneliness. One character signs up for an internet service provider but has no idea why. A graduate student maps out the way the closer we get to each other, the farther away we are, and we're led to believe that's a metaphor for the internet. There's also a suggestion that given the overload of negativity and loneliness in the regular world, ghosts start to inhabit cyberspace.
Above all, Pulse is great cinema. It is thrilled about the possibilities of generic forms and the possibilities of sound and image. It has found an ingenious strategy for conveying horror. Like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni's classic Blow Up, Kurosawa zooms in on computer screens and browser windows to discover that what our eyes want to see tends to be far more haunting than whatever the reality actually happens to be. In other words, buried deep in the grainy film texture are the ghosts of our own social and technological disillusionment.