capsule : the director of cure brings a weird and very complex concept to the screen .
one viewing will not be enough to understand fully the premise of pulse .
the idea is something about ghosts and the internet .
the film has an amazing apocalyptic style .
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+2 ( -4 to +4 ) perhaps the most disturbing ( and disturbed ? ) filmmaker in the world is kiyoshi kurosawa .
his films all seem to have one style , bleak .
the worlds he creates are terrifying and cold .
little known in the us to date , his films deliver the kind of horror that so many of our filmmakers promise and are unable to deliver .
most of his ideas are fresh and at the same time morbid .
his 1998 film cure , with one of his niftiest ideas , is just now getting a sadly limited release in the us and hopefully enough people will see it that his name will soon be one to conjure with .
cure is probably his classic .
last year he released seance , a remake of seance on a wet afternoon .
that was perhaps a miscalculation inserting supernatural elements into a non - supernatural story .
pulse is kurosawa back on form .
taguchi , a young computer expert , is late with his delivery of some important software .
two co - workers go to his apartment and find it a dismal dark affair in spite of his computer equipment .
taguchi , acting very strangely , lets his friends look for the missing software .
meanwhile he slips behind a plastic curtain .
when he fails to respond to calls his friends follow him behind the curtain and discover he has hanged himself .
if that was not horror enough the body seems to disappear leaving just a strange dark mildew - like spot on the wall .
taguchi 's computer seems to have been infected with some kind of computer virus .
people whose computer gets the virus seem superficially to die via suicide .
but they are not entirely dead .
their spirits seem to remain present somehow in the real world and on the internet .
people who get the computer virus are asked if they want to see a ghost .
if they say yes , they seem to be able to see real time images of the spirits still nearby somehow .
the computer shows them impossible images of ghosts in their own rooms as seen from cameras that do not exist .
this is all somehow connected to heaven and hell somehow filling up and overflowing " like a computer disk .
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instead the dead seem to be staying on earth and inhabiting computer viruses .
there is some sort of passage between worlds having something to do with doors marked with red tape and strange electronic disturbances on computers .
leave it to kurosawa to find a new kind of death .
this is a film that has more weird ideas piled together than lifeforce and somehow kurosawa
makes the film all work .
it may not totally convey his message of isolation and its parallels to death , but whatever it does convey is nightmarish .
kurosawa , who directs his own screenplay , ties his story into the real world with some familiar and accurate computer discussion .
frequently the plot is advanced with character hunches being assumed to be fact .
his plotting is frequently hard to follow and always very strange .
junichiro hayashi , the cinematographer who recently has been doing all of kurosawa 's films , creates a dark , cold , and gloomy tone .
images are obscured by semi - lighting or are behind plastic curtain .
scenes are not milked for their horror the way american exploitation films might .
people are shot with guns but there is little if any blood in evidence .
seeing black silhouettes on computer screens is not immediately scary .
kurosawa is not going for and easy visual shock , but a deeper metaphysical dread .
of any horror filmmaker in the world , kiyoshi kurosawa is the one to watch .
i rate this metaphysical look at isolation a 7 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale .
Output: P