Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 'Pulse' at 25

 

Kiyoshi Kurosawa: An Introduction 

25 years ago, in February 2001, director Kiyoshi Kurosawa released 'Pulse' in his native Japan. The film would premiere shortly after (in May) at Cannes, in the Un Certain Regard field, the first of the director's films to play in one of the competitions of the prestigious festival. The first of the director's films to premiere at Cannes came two years before: 'Charisma', the film whose script he'd received a Sundance Institute scholarship for in 1992, itself a follow-up to the 1997 film 'Cure', his now iconic horror-meets-police drama black magic thrill ride that dramatically changed his career trajectory and served as the fore-runner for the 'J horror' boom to come.

 

For over 15 years prior to his breakout with 'Cure', Kurosawa had worked on pink films, yakuza flicks made for rental shops, and TV B-horrors, among a host of other films -- 19 in total between and including his feature-length debut until 'Cure', and five features in 1996 alone. (Kurosawa remains a prolific filmmaker, having directed two feature-length films and a 45-minute short in 2025 and a near-2.5-hour feature film, having premiered at Cannes, in 2026.) Those pre-'Cure' credits include the six-part 'Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself!!' film series, the two-part tale 'The Revenge', both starring notable collaborator at this point in Kurosawa's career, Show Aikawa, and 'School Ghost Story F', an anthology of three stories that hit televisions four months before 'Cure' broke onto the silver screen. These films, Kurosawa says during an interview filmed in May 2016 for Arrow Video's blu-ray release of 'Pulse', were a way to stay in the industry and make films, though he would not fully leave the world he knew for a while longer -- into 2001 he was still directing stories within the 'School Ghost Story' anthology films. 

 

'Cure' marks a sliding-doors point in Kurosawa's career. Following the success of the film in launching him to getter recognition within the industry, Kurosawa started to make films on a larger, more commercial level. Even considering the straight-to-DVD yakuza thrillers 'Serpent's Path', and its spiritual sequel 'Eyes of the Spider', both featuring Aikawa, that come out in early-1998 and were in production during the lead-up to 'Cure'; these are films (especially Serpent's Path) interested in the psychological descent of its character at the heart, which will become a staple of the director, and served as a prominent theme in 'Cure', as viewers watched the downfall of Koji Yakusho's detective protagonist under the weight of an uncrackable suspect and a failing marriage. The yakuza backdrop, and a taste for white hot revenge, just happen to be fitting, natural backdrops for the depravity at the heart of some of Kurosawa's characters in these two films that would come later. Both are also natural transitional works for the next broad phase of the director's career. 

 

In 1998, after Kurosawa's final two collaborations with Aikawa as a lead, 'License to Live' was released, the director's second linking-up with Koji Yakusho following 'Cure'. More relevant at hand, for this piece, was its introduction of a crucial theme in this phase of Kurosawa's works: the aimless, existences of young people with little promise of better days. (Also see: 'Cure', 'Eyes of a Spider', 'Seance' (2000), and 'Before We Vanish' (2017) for examples of this ideas within the frame of a marriage). In 'License to Live', Hidetoshi Nishijima's developmentally arrested Yutaka Yoshii -- in a coma for ten years, coming out at age 24 to a whole new world, and entirely different family dynamics -- is the first example of Kurosawa pointing specifically at these emotions in young people, and serves as a counterweight to his exploration of these themes in 'Cure', previously, and 'Charisma', to come shortly after, within his body of work.

 

'Barren Illusion', premiering at Venice in 1999, is a direct follow-up to this theme: a world plagued with a crippling allergy issue that's more like a sweeping case of societal malaise that necessitates forced sterilization upon young people, again, including our protagonist. Here, Kurosawa presents a society crippling its young people, who in turn have little idea how to react; some fade in and out of existence, others make like 'A Clockwork Orange' and hit the streets for some rampaging. Either way, their disillusionment is apparent. 

 

'Bright Future', the feature film of Kurosawa's to premiere directly after 'Pulse' in 2003, is equally overt in its reflection of youths floating alone, starring two lead characters, aged 27 and 24 (one of whom is a young Tadanobu Asano), deeply disaffected with their dead-end jobs and lackluster lives. One (Asano), in an outburst of violence, kills their boss and his wife. Like 'Pulse', 'Bright Future' presents a story of young people withdrawn from each other; the two leads of 'Bright Future' are clearly one another's best friend, and when Joe Odagiri's character professes how he'll wait for Asano's character to get out of jail, it's more of a lover's yearning for something that cannot be. However, just as we will see in 'Pulse', this relationship is ill-fated, and the signs have always been there.

 

The jellyfish kills when its tentacle makes contact with a human, we are told. This, in essence, is what 'Pulse' is showing on a societal level. But with the newfound speed and scale of The Internet it's the humans doing the damage to themselves, finding solace in isolation, rotting from the inside out until they are hollow and looking merely for evidence that they aren't the only ones who feel this way. 

 

Pulse 

'Pulse', the first film shot by Kurosawa in the new millennium, revolves around two linear narratives; one showing a technologically-illiterate college student who downloads the World Wide Web for the first time, and one featuring four (more like three) friends who work at a plant shop/greenhouse and must deal with a series of mysterious and disturbing behaviors from those they know. Despite what has been 25 years of significant advancement -- no more downloading internet browsers off CD-ROMs -- 'Pulse' still speaks directly to the isolation that happens to us in the digital realm, and, in fact, is more relevant than ever as we live in digital worlds of our own creation, in our pockets 24/7, further putting us in silos away from one another. 

 

When hailing 'Pulse', one has to be mindful to also acknowledge that this film has such immense staying power owing, in at least some part, to luck. Kurosawa is rather self-effacing on the Arrow Video interivew when he claims to have copied the entire plot from 'Ring' (1998), needing some method of transmission for ghosts that wasn't just a video tape ... and this newfangled "World Wide Web" sure looked good to him! Kurosawa, then, could not have known that his film would present such an astoundingly prescient look at how the Internet would segment us individually and quite rigidly isolate us spiritually from our world and each other. On the Arrow interview, Kurosawa notes how he rightfully predicted the rise of the camera-phone, but things such as the film's connection to the way social media platforms fragments us despite its promise of greater interconnection, its depiction of a lack of personal intimacy on an emotional, and even physical, level, and the 'call of the void' this technology has, encouraging us to "escape" into its ether, all point directly our current condition.

 

In 'Pulse', college student Harue (Koyuki) shows novice computer user Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato) the project her 'senpai' is working on: a model of dots revolving around one another that she calls a "miniature model of our world". If two dots get too close, they will die, but if they get too far apart, they're drawn closer. Similar to that jellyfish central to 'Bright Future', this model is obviously a representation of how Kurosawa depicts relationships throughout all of 'Pulse'; characters in need of communion, and yet, too afraid to fully give it, or simply without the knowledge of how. Harue puts a point on this when she says to Ryosuke, "People don't really connect, you know? ... Like those dots simulating humans. We all live totally separately. That's how it seems to me." Ryosuke has no clue how to respond and the film cuts on him before he can even process and formulate a response. Harue's telling Ryosuke not to look in the simulation, in the context of the film, reads as a caution from experience; she has already seen deep into the simulation and understands the ways in which the horrors manifest.  

 

Kurosawa is also not infallible in his assessment of the modern condition. Also in the Arrow Video exclusive interview, he states, on the topic of those who are isolated, "loners" in society, "I'm not sure where we stand right now, but I think it depends on the person. It may sound like an exaggeration, but being a loner hasn't changed at all." Admittedly, much has changed even in the ten years Kurosawa gave this interview, and he is correct to state that challenges of intimacy and loneliness certainly vary, and are dealt with, on a person-to-person basis, as all things are. 

 

However, 'Pulse', and indeed many of Kurosawa's films, slide hand-in-hand reflecting into the frame of mind of hikikomori: those in Japan who were, in 1998, first defined by Tamaki Saito as, "cooping oneself up in one's own home and not participating in society for six months or longer, but that does not seem to have another psychological problem as its principal source" (Saito, Hikikomori: Adolescence without End, 1998). The Internet has, undoubtedly, exacerbated this issue of loneliness to the point where the concept of a "loneliness epidemic" has become a significant talking point for people in all walks of life and various sociopolitical contexts in the 2020s. Kurosawa's lack of acknowledgement of these changes does not take away from the progressive, and unfortunately grim, ways that digital culture has segmented us away from more true connections. 

 

When evaluating 'Pulse', the most prominent theme one will notice is the emphasis on social isolation. One thing that Kurosawa does brilliantly is to point at the cause of these societal ills being not the fault of the ghosts within the film, or the Web itself, but the cause is a much deeper sense of despair and detachment from the living world within Pulse's characters. While its "spread" is aided by the speed and connectivity of the Internet, the "infection" the ghosts provoke was a part of these characters, this universe, before we ever enter it. Consider one of the first couple of scenes in the film, when Taguchi is missing and just about to have been gone long enough to start worrying his friends, three of the eventual five main characters. Before anything out of the ordinary even occurs, Junko anxiously expresses a gut feeling that something is wrong. As Yabe walks in on the opening scene, expressing his own concern for Taguchi, the haunting score's wailing strings kick up a level, and pierce your ears even further when Michi drives on the deeply uncanny bus to the apartment complex from  Hell. Without anything wrong even occurring, the film is practically advertising in neon a sense of dread to its viewers. 

 

Extending from this idea I have just presented is the emotional isolation the characters feel themselves. In a scene at a sort of cafe/deli, Yabe says, offhandedly, unprompted, "It's so easy to hang yourself." As he will later in the scene I previously not with Harue and Ryosuke, Kurosawa cuts the scene before Junko or Michi even have the opportunity to change their blank expression to something more surprised. Would they even have? Likewise, later in the film, at Harue's house, as she delves deep into her backstory and feelings of being alone since she was a child, Ryosuke is comprehensively out of his depth and nervously asks to change the subject. In an earlier incident, Ryosuke seems not to pick up on the desperation in Harue's face as she says Ryosuke can call her "anytime, okay?", when she chases him down a hallway to give him her digits at the university. What is embedded at the core of all of our characters is a hole in their soul that is looking to be filled. Harue is rather generous in the amount of chances she gives Ryosuke, but there is simply a lack of connection here. Harue's 'connection' to the digital world, the call of the void of the ghosts, that final feeling that she feels that she's "not alone" in the world beyond ours, is far, far, stronger than the personal connection shown between the two, and Kurosawa is showing that just the mere idea of a 'connection' is not enough to save us. 

 

These failures of connection between Ryosuke and Harue are not the only time characters attempt to connect and fail to do so. Another brilliant example of this between these is Ryosuke telling Harue to wait on a train car for him to get help, only for her to up and bolt the nanosecond he turns his back. Ryosuke also does this to Michi as he tells her he'll be fine filling up the gas for the car, before promptly making his way into a Forbidden Room in chase of a runaway gas cap, condemning him to a fate he is so determined to outrun, or, more accurately, ignore. Michi does this, herself, her back being turned to Junko as she passively ignores what are pretty blatant cries for help before she becomes a shadow on the wall and particles in the wind. The highly important task Michi is focused on, instead, is going through the motions of making a pot of coffee. Parents are not spared this, either. Michi doesn't think too highly of her father, blatantly ignoring him despite his proximity (owing to some bad blood, surely, occurring during her parents divorce) flippantly telling her mother that she has her own friends and she'll be fine. When Michi meets Ryosuke, she is on her way trying, and failing, to find and save her mother after a moment of realization. The suffering of the film is immense and Kurosawa presents it to us on the most intimate of levels: one-on-one relationships between family, friends, and crushes.

 

Visual metaphor is vitally important in 'Pulse', too, and no visual metaphor is more pronounced than the plants our lead characters work with and are surrounded by frequently. 

 

To understand the metaphor of the plants, starting with a more specific example for the same idea may be easier. Michi is watching TV when she hears the story of a message in a bottle, launched from a Japanese island, which received a response from Malaysia ten years later, the bottle being discovered reportedly by accident. This message in the bottle serves the same purpose as a potted plant: a vestige of someone, or something, living in the natural world, confined into a smaller space and taken anyway from any context. I find it relevant that it's a 'surprise' for the sender of the message in the bottle to receive word back. Also consider how generic the vast majority of 'letters in a bottle' are unless ... they are a cry for "help", the very word repeated by the ghosts. Like many other conversations in this film, the attempt at connection misses the mark and is not what the other person was expected, i.e., not what they need at this time, anymore. The myriad of plants in the film, and the greenhouse/plant shop itself as a setting, are the more full-bodied explorations of this concept of isolation through segmentation. 

 

A scene in the greenhouse that reflects its importance well is when Junko attempts, and largely fails, to cheer up, and connect with, Michi shortly after the suicide of Taguchi. This first moment, in the greenhouse, is surrounded by isolated, potted, flora, and framed in the confines of artificiality. Shortly following this, after the interlude of their first discovery of the ghostly apparitions on Taguchi's CD-ROM, the mise en scene takes this a step further. The friends step out of the greenhouse and onto the balcony, surrounded by the city, bathed in fog, and with a short wall reinforced ominously by fencing to prevent what figures to be more jumps than falls. Within this shot, while are characters are penned in on the balcony, we are greeted almost immediately by two maturing trees, cordoned off in vinyl. If the visual motif was not intentional to you by this point, this shot should make it clear: living things surrounded by a cylinder of plastic. 

 

Kurosawa's usage of the greenhouse, and of the university in the narrative of Ryosuke and Harue, seems to imply, to me, a natural lack of extension in relationships to full intimate confidence. Consider how ill Junko becomes in the home of Michi despite her admirable attempts at care, and how the flight of Ryosuke and Harue seems to ultimately aspire to take them anywhere BUT their homes -- ultimately the two separating on the train for Harue to return home to the world of the ghosts. 

 

How the deli scene is shot, and how it uses greenery, too, provides a perfect segue into discussing the ingredient that lifts this film up: Junichiro Hayashi's observational cinematography. Hayashi shoots 'Pulse' to reflect both the ghostly nature of the central narrative as well as the detachment our characters feel from each other and their surroundings. When the friends/co-workers discuss Taguchi's suicide at the deli, the shot is framed from outside looking in through the windows. The shrubbery planted outside the restaurant is also prominent in-shot, making it appear that, just as in the greenhouse, this greenery is all around them. These shrubs are, like the greenhouse's setting and plants, another great example of natural life stunted through carefully curated horticulture, more likely than not individually planted and not connected beneath the soil. Even outside the greenhouse, Kurosawa frames this central friendship around a lush Trojan horse of well-manicured despair. 

 

The other critical piece of the diner scene is that perspective of shot. The cinematography is always highly observational in Pulse. In the diner, we, the viewers, seem to be peering literally through a window into their soul, observing the fact that this group of friends, ironically, seems to be unable to bare their soul to one another. 

 

The film's best known, most terrifying, scene, where Yabe 'meets a ghost' in a Forbidden Room, is a perfect example of a highly observational scene.

 

 

The viewer is frozen in place as the woman approaches, running in slow-motion, even stumbling, but inevitably coming. The build-up to the scene is also highly observational: shrouded in shadows, largely shot/reverse-shot with very little motion, and watching Yabe's walk away from the camera, entering deeper into the room and past the point of no return. Kurosawa switches briefly to a POV shot from the woman during the chase, to really capture the horror of Yabe, but his final masterstroke of the scene is forcing the viewer to watch as the ghost woman's face appears, slowly, from over the couch, setting up Yabe's quick demise.

 

During the opening credits sequence, this observational style is presented to the viewer early, and it's taken to the extreme; we virtually never see Michi's face, spectating her from behind, or viewing her from afar (like when she jogs up the staircase to Taguchi's apartment). When the Japanese character for 'Pulse' appears on the screen, accented in the red tape to come, Michi is digging through papers and files on Taguchi's desk while the camera pans in tight on her back. When Michi first notices Taguchi in the dark, the camera floats over her shoulder, but it does not follow her -- framing, instead, her conversation with Taguchi in the narrow corridor of the hallway, Taguchi drenched in darkness, even as he faces the camera. When Michi finally realizes something is wrong, the camera slowly floats behind her through the apartment, but abandons her as she steps through a plastic curtain into the hallway to find Taguchi hanged. 

 

Because 'Pulse' is so observational, and very static or slow-moving in its shots, when Kurosawa switches to handheld video camera at various point, it's jarring. Kurosawa goes to handheld innocuously, first, when Michi goes to turn off a TV that turns on by itself, but this is only a setup for the next time, when Michi sees Yabe and approaches him, so the handheld camera follows her, but by the time the camera turns back to the where Yabe supposedly was, he is a black shadow on the wall just as Taguchi was, already long gone, leaving the viewer just as disoriented as Michi by the shot and end result. We also get a return of handheld when Michi leaves her car to go back into the industrial factory to look for Ryosuke; with this scene occurring shortly after Ryosuke ignorantly follows a loose bolt into a 'Forbidden Room', the switch to handheld feels like Kurosawa telling us of impending danger through the language of cinema.

 

Kurosawa also presents a visual story in various other ways; for instance, the scene where it becomes obvious that Michi and friends' boss has been infected by this ghostly virus. In a scene that starts with those aforementioned vinyl covered trees in the foreground, Michi is studying potted plans in the mid-ground. Before she can re-enter the greenhouse, following after Yabe (remember, the 'home base' of their collective connection), the camera pans almost 180 degrees around to her boss, with a select few plants near him, seeming to be packing up. One of those plans is a tall, short, tree, with multiple stick-like 'sprouts' -- the actual greenery, the flowers, of the plant, once so prominent everywhere you looked in this setting, is suddenly minimal. When the camera pans as the boss moves, there is one, very sad looking, potted plant on a table in the frame. When the boss sits down, he is blocked in such a way that the plant, on the table partially behind him, is still visible, but much of the wilted green is not. Michi then runs away, letting the vinyl coverings moodly flap in her -- the physical manifestation of what Kurosawa uses to reflect 'blocking out' connection blowing into her face.

 

Likewise, Kurosawa uses sound cues, and a chilling score, with great effect to enhance the horror of the pictures in front of us. Kurosawa opens with the conclusion, and a focus on Michi, and the sounds of the internet connection fade to the sounds of the open water. There is also a very intentional fuzz to the digital video film; an intentional feeling of lower resolution. That fuzz returns in a heavy dose after the Show Aikawa bit-character creates the first Forbidden Room, implying that something may be birthing out of the static. (Pulse', as a whole, is shot on a lower resolution, introducing grain so that a viewer may believe something to be in the shadows.) When the building Aikawa's character creates the first room in is destroyed -- but not after releasing the evil into the world -- we hear that sound of internet connectivity once again; indeed, the sound of birth, ironically, the sound of connection.

 

Born on July 19, 1955, about eight-and-a-half months after the premiere of 1954's 'Godzilla', Kurosawa grew up with a love of being scared in the cinema. His first memory in the cinema being scared out of his wits at a monster movie and in the decades since that first moment, Kurosawa's films provide that joy  to a new audience. Of the great horror directors, Kurosawa is certainly among the most ominous. This is a film without jump scares, it's a film with much slow-burning horror, and, perhaps most importantly, now, in our modern society, it's a film about the failings of interpersonal connection in a digital world.

 

 

 

 

None of the photographs or videos embedded into this essay are my own. I credit Pulse © 2001 Kadokawa Corporation/Hakuhodo/Imagica for all imagery and footage. All rights reserved. YouTube videos are not my own. I credit Arrow Films Inc. for 'Broken Circuits', their 2017 interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa for certain direct quotes as cited in the text as well as background information on Kurosawa in the final paragraph. This non-commercial blog plot is intended for critical and educational purposes and my usage should be considered 'Fair Use' under Section 107 of the United States Copyright Act.