I finally watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film PULSE (Kairo). I don’t think I’ve seen any of this acclaimed director’s 30+ films, but this is the one people seem to mention most. And I get it now. There’s something very distinct about the potency of its forlorn, foreboding mood and the unusual way it combines a ghost story with an early internet thriller that then dissolves into a surreal apocalypse. The overcast skies, small, impersonal apartments and emphasis on staring at chunky turn-of-the-millennium computer monitors is already depressing before it starts to feel like depression may be its primary subject.

Michi Kudo (Kumiko Asō, CASSHERN) works with a couple other people at a small nursery in Tokyo. She’s waiting for her co-worker Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi, TOMIE, GODZILLA MINUS ZERO) to get her a computer disk he was supposed to prepare for her, and he hasn’t shown up for a few days, so she goes to check on him at his apartment. He’s there, but acting kind of weird, and then out of the blue he goes into the other room and hangs himself.

Back at the nursery they look at Taguchi’s disk and find images of him staring at his computer, plus mysterious things in the screens and reflections. This begins a cycle of investigating, experiencing strange things, coming back haunted, disappearing and or abruptly committing suicide. There are mysterious distorted phone calls asking for help, “forbidden rooms” sealed with red tape, and many images taking advantage of the eerie murkiness of low resolution video feeds. People fade into black stains on the wall, and vice versa. Bleak.

Meanwhile there’s this college student, Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô, CARVED: THE SLIT-MOUTHED WOMAN), who hooks up his internet and discovers his computer automatically signing into a weird websight with those creepy images. He goes to the computer lab to ask about it. It’s partly that he’s kinda slow but mostly the era we were living in that allows him to be completely clueless about the most basic computer stuff. Harue Karasawa (Koyuki, THE LAST SAMURAI, BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE) overhears him and tries to help, but he doesn’t even know what the url is for this sight he’s talking about. She tells him to bookmark it or hit print screen. He makes her repeat it slowly while he writes it down. Later they bump into each other and she comes to his place to help figure it out.

From this cute interaction we pretty quickly slide into stress dreams. Somebody tells him that the afterlife is all filled up and ghosts are invading the living world. A when there’s no more room in Hell the dead will walk the earth type deal. And we know that usually in a horror movie when somebody makes a claim like that they are correct. The Wikipedia summary of the plot says “The ghosts launch a full-scale invasion of the Kantō region,” which I admit I must not have picked up on, but yeah, something major and strange is definitely happening. It starts out small like any other ghost story and then goes wide. One of the few ghost movies where Tokyo is evacuated.

This is when we all thought the internet was bringing us together with new friends around the world. (In fact, it was. I met many of you this way.) But these people are only finding ghosts in their machines, and in their lives they’re desperately seeking human connection. Yet right after finding one Harue shifts to being all gloom and sadness. Ryosuke is such a doofus, so bad at knowing what to say to support her emotionally, but he’s trying. Can’t say I don’t recognize some of him in myself (derogatory). He convinces her they should leave town together, and they experience the weirdness of being the only people on the subway. He tells her it’s okay as long as they’re together, and she seems so surprised and relieved to be connecting with someone. When it stops he goes to check on something and we’re thinking come on buddy, don’t do that, do not leave her alone, and sure enough she just takes off. Great.

But he keeps looking for her. In the city he meets Michi, and they agree to stick together. I felt torn between thinking it was cold he seemed to immediately find a new woman to connect with, like a replacement for Harue, and thinking it was a miracle that one of the only people around was someone pleasant. I would latch onto them too. Anyway, she helps him search for Harue, but this is the type of horror movie where bad stuff happens individually to some of these characters and collectively to the entire world.

Watching PULSE so long after the fact I can see its influence on everything from that era of internationally popular J-horror to M. Night Shyamalan’s less popular THE HAPPENING, but it doesn’t feel like that type of familiarity has weakened it at all.  I imagine in 2001 it felt very current, a commentary on the new reality of online life. Some reviews call it a “techno-thriller.” Now the tech is kinda clunky so it’s something different, a look back at the early stages of our current maladies. It’s different screens we can’t stop staring at, different ghosts we’re invaded by. Lingering memories of ideas we thought were dead, families that stay in power from generation to generation, octogenarian politicians we’re still chained to because clearly there’s not enough room in Hell. And all of these malevolent spirits spread their curses through phones and computer screens, hypnotizing your parents through Facebook, scamming them with cheap A.I. chicanery, trapping them in an algorithm with no doors or windows to escape through. And yes, all this leaves us feeling gloomy and doomed and powerless like Harue.

That’s my reading of it today. I’m sure there are a million better ones, but I like mine. I think that’s part of PULSE’s greatness. It’s a movie that’s just viscerally unsettling in its mood and imagery, no meaning or explanation required for it to be a really solid horror movie. But at the same time it feels like it’s about life and death and the world in some abstract way. So it’s a poem, a painting. There’s so much room between the brush strokes for us to find personal meaning, a meaning that can change as our lives do, or as society does.

That’s beautiful. Grey and lonely and beautiful.