Pulse

2001 ‘回路’ Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Do you want to meet a ghost?

In the immense city of Tokyo, the darkness of the afterlife lurks some of its inhabitants who are desperately trying to escape the sadness and isolation of the modern world.

Haruhiko Katō Kumiko Aso Koyuki Kurume Arisaka Masatoshi Matsuo Shinji Takeda Kenji Mizuhashi Shun Sugata Ken Furusawa Teruo Ono Show Aikawa Masayuki Shionoya Kaori Ichijō Takumi Tanji Jun Fubuki Koji Yakusho Hassei Takano Atsushi Yuki Go Takashima Akiko Kitamura Rie Yasuda Zengoro Mamiana

Alternative Title

Kairo

thriller horror

119 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 3

"...once the system's complete, it'll function on its own and become permanent."
Unbelievable. I need to watch it again, but certainty one of the seminal films of the 21st Century. Indeed a very digital ghost story, one which encourages us to reflect on the new spaces which have been created or transformed since 2000. People interact with computer screens, televisions...but rarely ever phones. Perhaps because there is no screen (or wasn't really in 2001) for a telephone? It's very interesting and telling that the movie's near-climax (only because the movie takes a sudden, very unexpected shift following which I'm still struggling to make sense out of) is in an abandoned factory, an analogue space, and one where ghosts exist in.…
Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★½ 4

Remember when the internet was so new and mysterious we thought it might plausibly contain demons? Now we know it's just full of assholes.
Double feature this with The Midnight After.
Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 1

imagine if the internet wasn't actually a tool of establishing meaningful connections with one another that we all obviously know and agree that it is but was just another, newer, digital form of the terrifying existential isolation and mortality we've felt from very beginning........ haha........ unless?
think i'm gonna need to come back to this one because it's very good but it didn't quite get under my skin the same way Cure did and as demonstrated by the ending is intending a very different feeling i wasn't expecting of this film. that being said no one's mise-en-scène game is as strong as kurosawa and the use of screens, shadows and cg here makes the digital qualities of this at once tangible and unreal which adds a very unsettling layer to many of the already surreal horror sequences.
Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★ 5

I think the first thing I said to my friend Alex Enquist as I left the theater was that this was “the most Bordwellian movie ever made.” I don’t think the film has that much to say about our relationship to technology – it’s more of a gimmick to get the plot going (essentially Swimfan but never annoyingly so), but so perfectly constructed, where each shot leads into the next shot. Kurosawa jumps 180 degree lines, re-organizes the space of a scene via shots that feel unnecessary and bring us out of the action on screen, and then suddenly it becomes obvious as new information emerges into the frame. This can either be for horror (aka ghoooooooossssssts) or even comedy…
Review by connor ★★★★★ 8

Kurosawa’s Pulse operates on so many levels it’s tough to keep track of. That being said, it is essential to note that this is not a film about the sociological dangers of the internet, or what have you. Rather, it is a film about the degradation of human systems—especially those regarding not only communication but representation—and the means through which loneliness and alienation may proliferate as a virus in the wake of such breakdown. The fact that the internet is the system breaking down here is, as the film itself overtly makes clear, arbitrary. I’m only making a point to clarify this because I think it’s essential to the film’s thematic concerns to understand that the central hauntings here do…
Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

A rare case of a technologically contemporary film (be it horror or any other genre) only becoming more relevant with time. Kurosawa's digital ghost story is actually haunting, as people form connections that only distance them, the living cocooned into ghosts that seek out others to convert but can never seem to keep their turned pals around them. The direction is so subtle that the insistent score only bursts into sound after a ghost appears or something unnerving happens, as if even the composer were caught off-guard. Not scary, maybe, but the melancholy of the picture is as powerful a feeling a film has ever imparted upon me. A masterpiece.
Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★ 1

probably the best film ever made. one day i will be able to talk about this without crying, but today is not that day. i have depression and this movie understands what it’s like to be depressed and to suffer with your own mind better than anything i’ve ever laid eyes on. i’m not okay tonight, maybe i will be tomorrow, even just for a little while, just a little moment of peace.
Review by Roxanna ★★★★ 5

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

the apocalypse is instigated not by environmental disaster or a plague of zombies, but an isolation so severe that humanity knows nothing else but to die en masse. the last thing we will all know how to do together is perish.
Review by Ian West ★★★★ 3

Dreamlike 2001 techno-haze terror infused with genuine scares built on dread and the anticipation of it. Excellently crafted nerve rattling parallel plotline effectiveness and thoughts on loneliness/other topical fears as ghosts enter our realm via the interwebz as a conduit. Right up my alley, probably behind 1997’s Cure as my favorite Kurosawa experience, and I’m thrilled I still feel the same way about it nearly 20 years later—I’d even consider this among the best horror films of that era.
Highly unnerving.
Review by YI JIAN ★★★★★ 4

There has been a glitch, signals lost in noise, the faces we see become blurrier until only a dark spot remains, the screams of help we hear become more and more distant until they are completely drowned out by static, now it is too quiet, like a tv switched off in the dead of night, something is very wrong, and we are so lonely.
Review by K. Austin Collins

Expressionist shadows can suggest a number of things: what they do for Abel Ferrara, looming quietly throughout his criminal and spiritual urbanscapes, is not what they did for F. W. Murnau's silent, sometimes ironic (The Last Laugh) art. But they almost always, by nature, present themselves to us as the mythic darkness just beyond or behind something real. And while it's usually tempting to understand them through some moral equivalency, sometimes a filmmaker can instruct us to see them as something new, or at least as something else.
When characters die in this film, which happens frequently -- this is an existentialist, near-apocalyptic ghost story in which many people, known and unknown to the viewer, will die -- there are…
Review by Branson Reese 3

Got a huge laugh from me when one of the leads installed an internet browser that told him to “have fun” and he very quietly said “okay I will have fun” to himself.
Extremely effective when it’s a horror movie using the inherent strangeness and wrongness of surveillance footage to its advantage. 2001 is an unnerving year to reflect back on in 2020 because how far we haven’t come. We’re still just sitting around looking at each other online and getting lonelier and lonelier. Not a lot’s changed except that most of us have spent so much time looking at each other that we know not to wear wallet chains anymore, as this movie reminds us was once a fashion…

Recent reviews

Review by dan'sㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ ★★

isso deveria ter dado algum medo
Review by Clem_Blemly ★★★★★

Every time I try and write out my thoughts I get overwhelmed by thinking faster than I can write but this really is probably one of my favorite horror movies
Review by maximillian ★★★½

yeah i feel like i missed 90% of this. On the upside this is legitimately one of scariest movies i have ever seen. the first ghost scene will haunt me for the rest of my life. I fell asleep while trying to watch it and as a result my second attempt was a nightmarish hell of deja-vu. Super interesting ideas being thrown around that are probably well developed. I'm not smart enough to connect the dots however.
Review by con ★★★★

I hate how much I feel the need to compare the two but it definitely seems like Kurosawa was finishing a thought in PULSE that he had started 4 years before in CURE.
The first 2/3rds of this movie was some of the scariest I’ve ever watched. I hate to admit this about Cure, because it’s one of my favorites of all time, but like cure, it kind of lost my interest and fell off in the third act.
If you dug the glacial, detached, matter-of-fact style of Cure, you will get something out of this to make it worth your time.
On another note, it’s been interesting to experience flicks from the early 00’s slip into becoming distinctly retro, especially since I can now relate to some of the wonder and bewilderment these characters are experiencing in regards to the new technology available to them.
Review by Abraham Lainkonu ★★★★½

"T'inquiète pas pour moi."
Review by plantinhalui ★★★★

When I first watched this movie, I didn’t really like it. I was seventeen or eighteen, not that much younger than I am now, at twenty-one. Yet, this has such a different impact on me now that I’m slightly older, slightly more mature. I also watched it alone this time, and, emotionally, that does seem to make a difference for me (I watched it with my sister at first, in a bigger screen, without any headphones or ear-pods).
Pulse leaves something with you. It creeps under your skin mostly in silence, and it stirs… something. Maybe a sense of loneliness inherent to us all; realizing everything is so close yet so far. It feels thick in my mind, this feeling…
Review by nico ★★★★

loneliness is the true horror— it's inescapable and it's coming for us all. yes, i know. thanks, i hate it.
Review by TheStoogeSebas ★★★★

Here my video essay about Kairo: the horror and the loneliness.
Aquí mi video ensayo sobre Kairo: El terror y la soledad de manera incognoscible
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhte5L19A2s
Review by Jackboughtacam ★★★★½

I am trying to find the right words to describe just how hard this movie kicked my ass but I’ve got nothing. It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen a horror movie with an atmosphere this eerie or with sequences this terrifying. This movie is special.
Review by annabel 🌱🧚🏼🦖 ★★

Daily Horror Hunt June 2021 - 22. Watch a film in a language foreign to you.
Birth Year Challenge - 10/20
definitely dragged at points and it honestly just wasn’t that interesting or engaging
Review by Ioris ★★★

Il rompicha...
Review by Bintang Pandu Negoro ★★★

Kiyoshi Kurosawa menampilkan isu "kesepian" yang terjadi di Jepang dengan pengandaian yang segar. Kesepian dihadirkan dalam bentuk hantu yang punya kemampuan layaknya virus komputer yang masif. Bisa datang kapan saja di depan layar komputer.
Horror yang dibangun sangat efektif. Visual aneh penuh glitch, scoring mengerikan yang terdengar seperti ratapan wanita dan scene perempuan di bawah bayang-bayang tangga itu bener-bener bangsat.
Sayangnya, cerita yang dihadirkan kurang diramu dengan apik. Banyak hal yang terasa ganjil dan penjelasan muncul di saat yang tidak pas.