This film (titled KAIRO in its native Japan) was one of many Asian horror films to follow in the wake of the seminal RINGU (1998), but it was also one of the first to signal that perhaps the wave was cresting and beginning to recede. It features most of the expected elements, many of them orchestrated quite nicely, but it is also slowly paced and maddeningly vague in terms of plot and theme.
The story is about…well, it’s not quite clear what the story is about, at least initially. For the first half, the film plays out like a series of almost random scenes, with little continuity: A computer geek hangs himself for no apparent reason, and his friends fret about what could have caused his inexplicable decision; then they get freaked out when a computer disk he was working on contains an image of his room, with the dead man vaguely seen standing in the shadows (it never seems to occur to anyone that this might just be a picture he took while alive and saved on the disk). Continue reading “Pulse (2001) – DVD Review”