pulse

The Japanese film industry provided a much-needed enema for the horror genre in the new millennium. With an emphasis on old-school supernatural scares and a sense of Y2K technology dread, films like Hideo Nakata's Ringu and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001) swept through the fan community to provide an underground terror experience that the major studios weren't interested in providing. The huge success of Gore Verbinski's Ring remake changed that awful fast, and soon screens were filled with pale ghost kids capitalizing on a new sub-genre that Hollywood would soon bleed dry.

But something was lost in the translation. Looking back at Kurosawa's Pulse, now on blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video, there's an experimental edge that no American director outside of David Lynch would be willing to try. A 2006 remake by Wes Crave took the general plot synopsis - ghosts invade our world through the internet - and cleared away the clutter. But Kurosawa's film, for better or worse, is a whole lot more complicated than that.

After witnessing her friend hang himself, Michi (Kumiko Aso) brings a computer disc back to work. A hidden file reveals a ghostly image of the room in which he died and a sinister shadow burned into the wall. Fellow employees are soon stalked by mysterious phone calls and visions of a "forbidden room" outlined in red duct tape. Meanwhile a first time web surfer, Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato), stumbles upon a web page full of blurry figures that seem to be able to control his computer at will. His investigation teams him with a cute computer scientist who suspects something more dangerous than hacking is going on.

Point in fact, Pulse offers up a rare supernatural apocalypse. The film's final act stretches into some pretty ambitious territory and Kurosawa isn't always able to pull it off. He's on much firmer ground with his all-too prescient theory that, despite technology's goal of bringing the world together, it tends to keep people apart. His characters are social drifters, desperate to make a connection and hoping that the internet will be their salvation. Instead, technology opens a door into the overflowing afterlife that allows spirits to lay claim to our world.

At least, that's one theory. Kurosawa presents several potential explanations and leaves others unexplored, letting the story play out easily a half-hour too long. The tone of the film is remarkably similar to the recent Twin Peaks reboot; full of half-finished conversation, bizarre imagery and an aggravating habit of promising more than it can deliver. But like Lynch's unapologetic return to form, there is something unique buried in all the mystic mumbo-jumbo and supernatural suggestions. Pulse sticks in your head like a virus and messes with your OS in the best possible way.

Arrow provides the film with its Blu-ray debut, but Pulse isn't going to blow anyone away visually. Kurosawa's color-scheme is a jaundiced smear of yellows and browns, smothered in a grain structure not unlike a straight-to-video release. It works very well in the context of the film and (one would assume) Arrow has provided a perfectly accurate transfer of the original theatrical release. It just takes some getting used to. Extras include lengthy interviews with Kurosawa, who covers his whole career, and cinematographer Junichiro Hayashi, who explains whole the shot-on-video aesthetic. There's also a "video appreciation" with Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard (director the recent Death Note adaptation for Netflix and the upcoming Kong vs. Godzilla), an archive Making Of documentary, behind-the-scenes featurettes, premiere footage from Cannes Film Festival, trailers, TV spots and reversible cover art.