Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Pulse" Needed a Pulse

A floppy disk leads to a suicide, which then leads to a bunch of dots on a screen saver which supposes to represent our world, which in turn, leads us to the depressing "People don't really connect… We all live totally separately."

That pretty much sums up the movie, folks. With such a dismal summary of the entire movie, was there any wonder the people were dropping off like flies?

We're introduced to Michi (Kumiko Aso) traveling to check on co-worker Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), whose long silence concerned the rest of her friends. She arrives only to find out he was home. Taguchi apologizes for his strange behavior
and while Michi goes searching for a floppy disk he was working on for them, Taguchi quietly goes to hang himself in the other room.

The floppy disk, as the audience soon discovers, becomes the cataylst for the strange occurrences slowly snowballing to
its strange conclusion. Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo), another co-worker, receives a strange phone call on his cellphone and travels up to Taguchi's home as well. Here, after a few alarming discoveries, Yabe stumbles upon an innocently red-taped door called the "Forbidden Room".

On a parallel storyline, college student Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato) comes upon eerie images on his computer while on the internet. Disturbed yet oddly fascinated by the dark images of people moving disjointly on his screen, he goes to the computer labs where he meets computer lab worker Harue (Koyuki) who agrees to help him out, only to be drawn closer to what we can only call a morbid fascination with the "Forbidden Room".

Through the separate events unravelling, we learn that the spirit world is coming to a peak, now intruding into our world through any means possible, using isolation and lonliness to lure new victims to succumb to a state of depression and fear that will crumble their very physical bodies to nothing. More and more red-taped doors begins to appear as more and more spirits spill over to our reality. As the now despondent Harue intones, "People don't really connect… We all live totally separately." We are doomed to be forever alone in a crowded room.

The two storylines slowly intersect as our two protagonists begin to realize the people around them are slowly disappearing or dying at will in this state of despondency. As their city, their reality slowly disintergrates around them, Michi and Kawashima meet and together, they escape Japan on a boat to seek out any survivors.

The Pulse sorely lacked cohesion. Random scenes that floated aimlessly around like the screen saver Kawashima encountered yet never really connecting until the last 15 minutes of the movie. The director relied on muffling the life sound in the movie - the urban beeps and hums of people and machine - so only the characters' voices truly stand out. They sould like they're standing alone in a room, truly fending for themselves. However, you can't sympathize with any of the characters. Kumiko Aso's Michi came off too willowy of a protagonist to root for and at times, you wonder if she would be the next victim. Michi's friend Junco (Kurume Arisaka) came off too bubble-head and too shrill that all you can really do was breathe a sigh of relief when she succumbs as well. Haruhiko Kato's Kawashima pulled off the bewildered "What's going on?" persona very well until you realize that's all he basically does for most of the movie, surviving on sheer denial and determination that if he can't see it, it can't hurt him. That belief ultimately led to his fate in the end.

Let's face it. After Blair Witch Project, movie-goers' taste for horror and suspense went up a notch. What better timing then with the debut of Hideo Nakata's Ringu (or the 2002 version The Ring for all the non-subtitle readers) giving us a taste of the previously untapped wealth of Asian horror flicks. We were allured into being scared out of our wits with a trick of lighting, the somber colors and the ever present long-haired ghost. No longer will the traditional long-nailed, mask-wearing, axe-welding murderer would suffice. Horror is now pulled from our own mental ability to decipher the scary from out of the shadows of the director's making.

All the characteristics we're accustomed to now call 'scary' were present in The Pulse. The dark lighting, disjointed actions of the supernatural, and the moaning music that climbs to a crescendo at the point of each scene the audience is suppose to make as "scary". Sadly though, the elements itself did not make the movie. We're never told clearly why all of this was happening, why the spirits wish to grab the living to join them. Each scene is filmed with no glimpse of the outside, no clear details of what is happening beyond what's before you. The movie feels claustrophobic, too bland and much too enclosed with no real meaty grip on the storyline to make any sense or pull us in on its journey. Each scene and thread was pieced together too weakly that when the movie builds to its climax, one can't feel as anxious as our protagonists did as they tried to escape Japan, but rather annoyed that it took so long to begin with.