Pulse

Pulse – 2001 – Japan

This movie actually scared me. The story, about ghosts using the internet to cross over into the world of the living, doesn’t make much sense. But that is what makes Pulse so compelling. Their enigmatic actions make the ghosts seem so otherworldly and eerie, and scenes of them have a palpable sense of dread. The ghosts never really do anything other than stand there and occasionally trash about or weave around like they are dancing. They just look like people, but they seem to merge into the darkness in a powerfully sublime way.

Pulse is a very visual movie, and its visual vernacular is bleak. There are graphic scenes of people committing suicide, including a woman jumping to her death that looks so realistic that I can’t figure out what sort of trickery was involved in making it. Red tape, used to seal doors from the ghosts, is a visual motif. There is also a really subtle effect where the ghosts transform into stains on the wall. The power of Pulse’s visuals is that they never show too much. The fearsome things are always obscured, and the viewer is never quite sure what they are seeing.

Although the term “loneliness epidemic” is recent, Pulse could be a comment on this modern phenomenon. The movie explores the socially-isolating nature of the internet, and it seems to compare life online to a sort of living death. Although it’s hard to say for sure. Nothing about Pulse is very clear. The outcome is hopeless though. In the final scenes, after a wave of suicides, Tokyo has been depopulated, and the only surviving characters are left wandering the city’s empty streets.

We all know the internet sucks, but Pulse depicts it as the hopeless hell-dimension that it really might be. In that way, the movie seems way ahead of its time.

Rating: 7/10