You've got hell

The dead surf our minds in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse.

By Chuck Stephens

THE JAPANESE TITLE of Pulse – a startlingly bleak, apocalyptic thriller made by Kiyoshi Kurosawa back in 2001 that is only just now enjoying its US theatrical release – is Kairo. No, it does not concern the Middle East, though you might be forgiven for considering that possibility. Kurosawa has long had a penchant for giving his oddly off-balance and always unnerving ultramodernist movies extremely open-ended titles; even before he changed the name of his End Times allegory Jellyfish Alert to Bright Future, he was making nihilistic crime flicks with counterintuitive appellations like Cure and Charisma. You remember Charisma – the movie where Koji Yakusho played a disgraced police detective hell-bent on preserving a scrawny but potentially world-destroying tree?

In fact, kairo is a Japanese term that (according to translator Linda Hoaglund, who has subtitled nearly all of Kurosawa's films) refers to an electronic circuit, or to a kind of quasi-electric connection made within the path of life. Somewhere along the way, Kairo's producers decided that Pulse would probably work better for Kurosawa's western audiences, especially as Pulse sounds wholly more sanguinary than a techno-gizmoidal direct translation like Circuit might. Given that Kurosawa's films are all about the ways modern-day ambiguities tend to drain humanity of rosy-cheeked flush, Pulse is indeed a good fit. A movie all about undead entities who invade our mortal realm through a modem connection that refuses to log off, Pulse finally suggests a moral along the lines of, "When there's no more room on the Internet, the dead will surf our minds," or an alternate title like Night of the Living Web.

Pulse's plot begins when cyberdude Taguchi doesn't show up for work at the Sunny Planet Sales botanical lab – a typical sort of establishment for the flora-obsessed Kurosawa – and problems begin to arise when everyone seems to need the mysterious floppy disc he'd taken home to tinker with the night before. Coworker Michi (Kimiko Aso, last seen as the heroic teenage whale-wrangler in Shohei Imamura's Dr. Akagi) volunteers to check up on Taguchi at his apartment. When she gets there, Taguchi lets her into his pad, points her to the floppy, and then steps into the next room to hang himself, twisting his neck into a shape as gnarled as one of Charisma's branches. Later, back at the office, the SPS employees find a strange screen-grab their late colleague had saved to the disc: It's an image of Taguchi's computer monitor, and on the monitor there appears this same image again, in infinite regression.

Elsewhere, a local college student named Kawashima decides he'll sign up with an Internet service provider in hopes of chatting himself into a nonvirtual relationship. But the new server he logs on with, Uranus, begins to flood his desktop with mpegs of a number of apparently death-bound computer users, and when he tries to log off, all Kawashima gets is a message reading, "Would you like to meet a ghost?"

You don't need a copy of Haunted Web-browsing for Dummies to see where this is going. Kawashima's not alone. More of Japan's young Netizens find similar images – often with the kanji for death scrawled somewhere in the background – on their monitors. SPS employees begin getting cell phone calls from the late Taguchi, calling out for help.

The images that have led some critics to claim that Kurosawa had pilfered notions from the endless Ring cycle – when in fact Cure influenced Hideo Nakata – are those screen-grabs of the faces of the nearly departed that appear to have been smudged into some smeary state of disintegration. But the ever-escalating creepinesses in Kurosawa's Pulse seems less attuned to the nuances of Ring's lethal videotape paradigm than to the sorts of surrealist interior decorations you might find in a film by David Lynch, if not to an altogether non-site-specific sense of Japan as a Cronenbergian dead zone, where existential isolation has attained a critical mass that not even death can dissipate.

Everywhere Kurosawa looks in Pulse, he finds some cyber-symptom of a widespread social sickness, whether in screen savers meant to suggest the cosmic dropping of human connections, or in the cigarette smoke-like stains left behind on bedroom walls and other domestic surfaces by living beings who, like the atomic-bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have suddenly been vaporized into eternity and dust. Eventually, those who perish in Pulse in just that manner are legion, and the few peripheral characters who do manage to survive are those who realize early on that an onslaught of lonely phantoms is only a DSL connection away. Even some of them are emotionally attached to the www.spirits they've encountered. They react by sealing off the rooms in which their abjectly ethereal visitors had first appeared to them with lengths of blood-red duct tape, a gesture that is ultimately less a caution against what's lurking within than a "log-on" for other soon-to-be-lost souls.

In fact, Pulse's most startling moment occurs in just such a red-taped chamber, when from out of a shadow a terrifyingly indistinct she-vapor dressed in a burgundy party frock begins slowly advancing on a ghost-busting investigator. In a single heart-stopping, Butoh-like body move, Kurosawa's apparently clumsy chimera suddenly lurches into a ray of dusty sunlight – and into the petrified audience's fully mortified view. In another director's hands, such a moment might have resulted in the most idiotic pratfall-of-terror ever attempted, but under Kurosawa's control, it becomes a mind-rending moment that's both breath-snatching and weird beyond words – a kind of comically creepy, if finally completely demonic, two-step that signals the beginning of humankind's last tango in Tokyo.

And speaking of fancy footwork, a final warning about the upcoming Hollywood remake of Pulse: Kurosawa's man-muse Yakusho once starred in another Japanese superhit that Hollywood decided it could improve upon. Better, in that instance, involved casting Richard Gere in the Yakusho role and keeping the movie's original title, Shall We Dance? They should have opted for something more prosaic, like The Ghost with Two Left Feet.

'Pulse' opens Fri/16 at Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness, SF. (415) 267-4893. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for showtimes.