Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 5

  "...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.…

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 2

  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.

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★½ 5

  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.

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  Review by BRAT ★★★★ 3

  a techno-ghost story that suggests the hollow detachment of the internet is a symptom that is both highly contagious and inescapable 😁

  Pulse presciently predicted in 2001 that widespread internet use would lead to chronic loneliness, isolation, and misery; states of mind that are represented here as shadowy black stains and paranoid red tape. the dreary and dread-filled atmosphere supersedes its thin plot, crafting something trepidatious and ambiguous, eliciting scares from the ethereal and the existential rather than the visceral. had to see it on 35mm with a crowd so the internet ghosts that feed off of solitude couldn’t get me

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  Review by connor ★★★★★ 10

  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 social 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…

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  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.

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★ 2

  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.

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  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…

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  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.

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  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…

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  Review by YI JIAN ★★★★★ 6

  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.

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 5

  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.