PULSE

In a small town in Japan, strange events begin to occur: many people disappear without a trace, others resort to suicide, and a mysterious website, showing dark rooms with unfocused images and followed by the question "Do you want to meet a ghost?", spreads rapidly across the computers of the Japanese town. Following these strange events, the young Michi, with the help of a similarly young computer expert, begins to investigate what is happening and will discover that behind it all lies the threat of an otherworldly force that spreads through computers and is intent on exterminating humanity. We are in 2001 when in Japan, from the mind of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, this small horror film is born, which in a very short time manages to seize the title of "cult" and seems to want to be a true masterpiece of Japanese cinema. Kurosawa writes and directs an unusual film, an extremely pretentious horror that decides to self-exalt by hiding behind philosophical themes; in fact, the film in question seeks to be a deep reflection on loneliness and what it can cause, showing the individual as a minuscule and insignificant being inserted and dispersed in a society that does not offer great interaction capabilities; moreover, it wants to provide a heavy criticism of technology, which is seen as an absolute threat and as a source of destruction for man. But it is understood from the beginning that these themes have been inserted only to elevate the product to a "serious" film (especially the topic of "loneliness") and they seem to be decidedly out of place as Kurosawa seems to have difficulty in dealing with these "philosophical" topics, so that everything will be just verbally mentioned in some scene but nothing is visually communicated. So, how should "Kairo" be considered? Should we adapt to the common gossip and consider this film a true masterpiece of Japanese cinema, adapting to that line of thought that tends to consider any Eastern film born between the end of the nineties and the beginning of the two thousand a masterpiece (whatever the true results achieved by the work)? Perhaps it would be more honest to evaluate this "Kairo" for what it really is and that is an excessively overrated film that with great difficulty manages to be digested by the average viewer. In fact, we are faced with an extremely slow film (but we could calmly use the adjective "boring") and that, despite its considerable duration (almost two hours), never manages to get to the heart of the matter; but the worst work is offered to us by the disastrous screenplay that seems too confused, botched, and adorned with many holes and hasty finds inappropriate. Other negative aspects of the film can be found in the banal dialogues (but this could be due to an Italian adaptation), in the total absence of tension or suspense, and in the aesthetic representation of the ghosts that, contrary to what the Orientals know how to do in their films, here do not appear at all frightening or disturbing but ridiculous and barely manage to integrate with the surrounding landscape due to dated digital effects. However, the film is not without merits, as it boasts a surely original and intriguing story (but unfortunately poorly developed) and a good use of sets, especially in the second half of the film where we witness a typically deserted Japanese city, a true post-apocalyptic scenario surely of great visual impact. The film in question, "Kairo", remained unreleased in Italy until the release this summer of its American-style remake, "Pulse"; Kurosawa's film thus made a fleeting appearance in Italian theaters for just one weekend at the end of August and has recently been distributed on home video by Mediafilm under the name "Pulse – l'originale".