'MORE FRIGHTENED THAN I've ever been in a movie theatre."

"It's the scariest film you'll see this year – and possibly any year after." –When it comes to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's long-suppressed Pulse, any rave is a good thing, and the sentiments above come from discerning reviewers – Esquire critic Mike D'Angelo in the former instance and Time Out New York (and former Bay Guardian) critic David Fear in the latter – rather than the usual phonies who make a living selling their names and hyperbolic kiss-assery to the studios. In fact, for once I feel like joining the wild praise party. But I'd like to spin it in a different direction.

Pulse is one of the greatest movies about loneliness and melancholy ever made.

That observation is worth highlighting for a couple of reasons. One is that those curious enough to see Pulse might expect a typical J-horror film that delivers its sense of fright – its scares – through shadowy appearances by black wraiths. Kurosawa's movie does have its weird phantoms, but its ominous dread runs a great deal deeper.

Basically, many of Pulse's most unsettling moments are also its saddest. They often don't stem from sonic or visual shock tactics, but from lines of dialogue – startling ideas about solitude that are suffused with a palpable sense of sorrow.

It isn't a stretch to say that Kurosawa is a philosopher – one as humorously grim as E.M. Cioran – and a poet of the type of depression that a mad modern world generates. Pulse, even more than the better-paced Cure, is his masterpiece (a word I don't throw around) because of its emotional pull.

Like many flawed yet superb works, it possesses uncanny elements. A television news show broadcasting the names and faces of missing people, a shot of a plane late in the movie – both of these elements presaged Sept. 11, 2001 with eerie precision, even if there are echoes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki present as well. Yet Kurosawa isn't some Nostradamus as much as an extremely perceptive artist. You could say this movie is his 21st-century update of Godard's Weekend, perhaps more brilliant, with computers taking the place of cars. More dolorous than Godard's apocalypse, it isn't without its comic elements. The would-be hero, Kawashima, has a Keanu-like, clueless optimism – at one point he can't find his way out of a library.

There are scenes in Pulse that give me the chills, but in the tearful, rather than fearful, sense – they're the kind of chills that happen when I encounter something that moves me. Take the sequence where Kawashima and Harue discuss life and death in Harue's apartment. As Takeshi Haketa's mournful score swells, the characters look for some hope, only to stumble upon new levels of despair.

(Johnny Ray Huston)