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