Still deeply grieved by her best friend’s suicide, Michi cannot shake the feeling that there was something odd about it. The hard drive retrieved from his apartment only reaffirms her suspicions. It is packed with weird images. At the same time, student Kawashima is being haunted by equally strange pictures on his own computer. The two team up and try to get to the bottom of it all. Soon enough, they come to the shocking realization that ghosts are making their way into our world via the internet. Their intentions remain unclear to them, but whatever they are, they cannot be good, right?
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is very likely one of the eeriest movies within the Japanese horror genre. Although his ghosts «don’t do anything», he still skilfully creates an unnerving atmosphere. Granting us room for our own imagination, he never explains any of the happenings that unfold right under our noses. He also confronts the viewers with a primal fear: loneliness. Hence, the magic word here is psychological horror, not gore. Pulse turns our precious internet on its head and what is meant to connect us to each other becomes the very source of our loneliness and isolation.
Céline Mosbacher, translated by Alicia Schümperli
