Review of Pulse / 回路, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

If you’re new here and stumbled upon this blog post through the depths of the Internet (most likely Google, judging from analytics reports), welcome! My name is Ashley, and I run this blog as a bit of a side project. For a while I worked as a film critic at an online outlet, but then I ended up quitting that job and working on my blog here because I wanted to focus more on international cinema.

That said, I spent quite a bit of time reflecting on what kinds of movies I’m watching. East Asian cinema and books have always been the core of my focus, even if they are a bit harder to access. Now it’s easier due to the popularity of Asian content, but sometimes the movies I want to watch I can’t find online with English subtitles.

I also realized that I wanted to diversify the kinds of content I’m consuming. A big part of my philosophy is that I want to learn so much about the world and its people, which means I want to make myself as uncomfortable as possible when I can do so. New experiences are like a gold mine to me.

So what I’ve been doing is trying to go outside of my comfort zone when it comes to movies and books. I’ve been running this little initiative on my blog, not focusing on the profit side of things, and I’m more happy chasing my interests instead of money.

I watched Pulse because of this. I’ve seen a handful of Japanese movies during my lifetime, but I’ve never watched a Japanese horror movie despite them being so famous in the Asian cinema world.

Alright, I’m rambling. We don’t want to get into the semantics of the context of how we got here—we need to get to the actual review and summary!

Ghosts begin infiltrating the real world, leading to the gradual eradication of humans.

This is a movie that has to storylines going on within in. The crux of the problem is that ghosts are starting to bleed into the real world and haunt people for the sake of escaping their constraints, and they’re getting here through the Internet.

Our first storyline follows Tokyo transplant Michi as she works at a plant shop. One of her coworkers, Taguchi, is missing. He was last working on the computer disk for the shop, and when she goes to visit him at his apartment, she finds him acting really weird.

As she turns around to look for the disk, she turns around and sees he hung himself and is decaying. Doubting herself, she looks into the disc and sees it fulls of pictures of Taguchi looking into the computer screen with a ghost seen with him.

Her other coworker Toshio gets a call that repeats “help me” and sees Taguchi’s ghostly image on his phone. He goes to Taguchi’s apartment and sees a black stain on the well, and then a sign saying it’s the forbidden room. Right outside, there’s a sealed door; he enters and spots a ghost.

He then disappears for a few days and reappears at work a different person. He tells Michi to beware the forbidden room, and when her boss goes missing, she gets a phone call saying “help me” but in Toshio’s voice. A stain is on the wall, like the one from Toguichi’s apartment, and their other coworker goes to the forbidden room by accident.

Michi stops him from being consumed by a ghost, but his entire personality is gone. When at her apartment, he walks toward a wall and becomes a black stain, and Michi decides to go check on her mother when she doesn’t answer her phone.

The second plot of the story follows Ryosuke, a college student who just got a new Internet service. His computer seems hacked though, displaying rooms full of people in the dark, even in the middle of the night without him touching it. He asks a graduate student for help, and when he goes to screen capture the imagine, a man with a plastic bag over his head appears on the screen.

Then a graduate student tells him they think ghosts are invading the real world. The other graduate student goes to her apartment and sees the man, then a live video of herself, and sees how a ghost comes toward her. Ryosuke comes to visit, but she is gone.

More and more people are missing, and the ghosts are taking over. Ryosuke crosses paths with Michi, and he finds the grad student in an abandoned factory with a plastic bag over her head. She shoots herself, and Ryosuke, after their car breaks down, finds the forbidden room.

He then loses his reason for staying alive, although Michi rescues him. They get to Tokyo’s waterfront and are rescued by survivors, but when Michi goes back to their room, she finds Ryosuke sitting there with his eyes closed. He becomes a black stain on the wall, and Michi reflects on how she got here.

Overall Thoughts

Although this is my first Japanese horror, and I don’t know about the themes they usually dwell on, I was impressed at what I was watching. Modern horror sometimes relies on cheap tricks to get you scared, but I find this to be a psychological horror that’s actually very thought provoking.

I don’t watch a ton of horror in general, and I think I want to in the future. Sure, this isn’t the perfect movie. There are some plot points I found to be a bit looser and not tied up very neatly. That usually drives me up the wall when it comes to storytelling.

But I’m fairly happy with what I watched, and I’d return to this movie again. It wouldn’t be in the near future, but definitely in the future for sure! Go watch it if you haven’t already.

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