Friends commit suicide or disappear in this eerie, prophetic J-Horror essential as Kurosawa shows how the web would exacerbate collective angst and loneliness as ghosts are stuck in liminal spaces between the afterlife and reality, mediated by the digital screen.
Review #3,026
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
2001 | Japan | Horror, Mystery | 119min | 1.85:1 | Japanese
PG13 (passed clean) for some disturbing scenes and horror
Cast: Haruhiko Kato, Kumiko Aso, Koyuki, Kurum, Arisaka, Masatoshi Matsuo
Plot: Two groups of people discover evidence that suggests spirits may be trying to invade the human world through the Internet.
Awards: Won FIPRESCI Prize – Un Certain Regard (Cannes)
International Sales: Kadokawa
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Slightly Disturbing – Ghosts; the Internet; Loneliness & Isolation
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: Screener (as part of Perspectives Film Festival 2025)
Spoilers: No
Pulse is everything everywhere gradually, not all at once. It is about seepage turning into disruption, about paralysing fear turning into existential loneliness, and of course, about the burgeoning impact of new technology like personal computers, dial-up modems and the mysterious Internet.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the master of modern dread in nondescript urban milieus, gives us a psychological mystery that ranks as one of J-Horror’s most essential entries.
It’s eerie at times as ghosts operate in the liminal spaces between the afterlife and reality, mediated by the digital screen. (Cut down on your screen time, guys—you never know what’s lurking within the ones and zeroes.)
As friends commit suicide or disappear, the living are compelled to do the same. Such is our lonely world that human connections seem elusive—one could feel how prophetic Pulse was in showing how the web (and by extension, social media) would exacerbate this collective angst.
“I’m scared to be alone.”
While less grounded than, say, Kurosawa’s earlier Cure (1997), an extraordinary, and shall we say, hypnotic, serial killer mystery, Pulse shares a similar sense of the characters’ world disintegrating as they enter an abyss that would change everything they know about how reality operates.
More of a dystopian mood piece than straight-in-your-face horror with jump scares and gore, Kurosawa’s work is available in a beautiful new 4K restoration.
Yet, it is those pixelated, grainy moving images on the computer that marked the early 2000s that are most haunting (which Kurosawa shows in unsettling close-ups), seemingly stuck in a time loop, bearing the traumatic traces of the past, while uncertain of what the future holds.
As a programmer, I would imagine pairing Pulse with Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002), a corporate espionage thriller dealing with the dark web—though they are dissimilar in style and tone, they are equally prescient of the things (or times) to come as humanity grapples with newfound abilities in exploiting forsaken souls in an increasingly desensitised world.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 
This is very slow. I remember watching during on of the early SGIFF, at a midnight screening no less, and almost fell asleep. So ashamed about it.
LikeLike
Probably because it was midnight and you had already watched something prior to it?
LikeLike