Tuesday, July 26, 2011

PULSE (Japanese) (2001)


‘Ghosts won’t kill people because that would just make more ghosts. Instead they will try to make people immortal, by quietly trapping them in their own loneliness.’
What is more horror than the inner vacuum of human? My second Kiyoshi Kurosawa film and the man left me shocked and surprised to see how he’s redefining the cinema of horror to altogether different direction. He said in one of his interview, “Film for me is a medium point between a fictional story and reality. You start with a genre, which is fiction, and gradually move towards reality. Somewhere in between you find the film.”
On surface ‘Pulse’ a.k.a. ‘Kairo’ shows you, the young men haunted by distorted and blurry images of ghosts either on screens of their computer, television or cell phone. The frustrated victims disappear or committing suicides. But behind that bizarre horror, the film is an allegory of the world where indifferent technology rather than connects, breeds alienation and solitary existential trauma to us. Kiyoshi gave us a direct clue which is an allegory in form of a miniature model of world where a programming simulation running on computer screen- where if two dots get too close, they die, but if they get too far apart, they’re drawn closer. Do people really connect through indifferent technological mediums of communication or reflects their solitary and secluded existence?
Kiyoshi removed the thin layer of the world where ghost is reality; the ghost is no one but disturbing reality of human loneliness! What’s that ‘forbidden room?’ Is it the death…loneliness…human mind or the indifferent world? Kiyoshi brought unnatural bleakness to the city of Tokyo through his camera and shot selections where the cold isolation of death and loneliness maintains the deliberate use of darkness with low key lighting throughout the film making us felt the inner emptiness of characters.
One of the highly recommended horror films…especially for those who sneer their noses calling ‘horror’ just B or C genre? Is it really…with films like this?
Ratings-8.5/10

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