Review: Pulse (2001)

You know, writing these reviews every day in the month of October, I sometimes forget that these movies are meant to be scary.  I might wax poetic about childhood nostalgia, or brutally mock the decision-making of a film, or even talk about my love of the more terrible attempts at making a horror movie, but I seldom talk about movies that are scary.  Looking back at last year's list of movies, I can only count Shelby Oaks, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, The Taking of Deborah Logan, and maybe Wolf Man as movies that were actually frightening - even the more respectable classics I watched were viewed more with a sense of detachment given how well versed I was in their histories.  So it was quite nice to go into this movie blind and be genuinely unnerved by it at various points.  It makes sense that this movie is credited with starting the J-horror movement alongside Ringu.

Pulse is a 2001 Japanese techno-horror movie with dual storylines:  One following Michi (Kumiko Asō), a plant shop worker whose coworkers start disappearing; the other following Ryosuke, a college student who sets up his Internet and immediately starts having weird things happen on his computer.  The characters go through similar experiences as strange things start happening to them and the other citizens of Tokyo.

The first 45 minutes of this movie are damn near perfect: the first scare is set up so perfectly that when the shock comes - not as a jump scare, but as a horrified reaction - you are left questioning what has happened just as much as the character.  It's filmed with a hazy, dream-like quality that makes every movement or dialogue feel like it can go in unexpected directions.

The movie goes further by setting up what seem like traditional scares, then somewhat letting the air out of them (both the audience and the characters relax, if only briefly) before hitting us when something truly horrific.  The movie doesn't use jump scares for any of this, but keeps the tone, the color, the mood of the film in an ever-foreboding state so that when we reach these moments relaxation, we cling to them that much harder for relief.  It's astoundingly effective even now, 25 years later, even though this movie is very much about 2001.

With every potential relief ripped away from the audience, they begin to feel the same exhaustion and lethargy that begin to affect our protagonists.  When we finally get a moment where a character screams, it feels as if she is screaming for all of us - a primeval wail that is one of the rare moments where the audience gets a brief release.

Everything about this feels deliberate:  Writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa makes every moment of this movie count in ways both big and small.  The terror can be present in front of us, or just out of sight: around the corner or on the other side of the door.  He is guiding us through this story he wants to tell without it feeling manipulative, but making sure we feel what he wants us to throughout.

I will recommend this movie to everyone.  It is in Japanese, so make your peace with subtitles, but this is what great horror is meant to be.

9 out of 10.