home
| art & architecture | books & cds | dance
| destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
A somewhat over-hyped indie film of the current season, Pulse
is a psychological horror film, purportedly of the most sublime order. It entails an
unexplained take-over of the world (that is, living human beings) via a computer software
program, which allows ghosts to access the living through the Internet. A group of young
people in Tokyo (some are university students, some work for a commercial nursery) find
their sense of isolation and fear mounting, as first one friend, then another commits
suicide, disappears, or turns into shadowy black powder against a wall or on a floor.
Pulse is filmed almost entirely in murky tones, even though many
scenes consist of white backgrounds. Interiors, illuminated by dim, indirect or
cloudy-skied lighting, include white-walled apartments, computer labs, a grocery market
and other public spaces bathed in fluorescent lighting. Exterior shots take place on
cloudy days or at night. Even abandoned warehouses and factories manage to be fully, if
dully lit. After a while, the key visual motif of ghosts–as veil or
shroud–emerges. Indoor spaces often appear more open than they really are; walls of
glass or gauze curtains separate. The nursery greenhouse on a rooftop is enclosed in glass
and potted trees outdoors are wrapped in a protective gauze. During moments of drama,
filmy plastic sheets suddenly billow in front of an actor, where none had been a moment
ago. The opaque white screens of the world of the living mirror the dark screens of the
ubiquitous computer monitors. As the world depopulates, ghosts seem to be spying
everywhere. Indeed, the proliferation of the haunting, all-seeing computer eyes conspires
to create an atmosphere, paradoxically, of indolent creepiness.
Much of the film follows Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko), a kind of
clueless young man, who refuses to contemplate death. Each of the other characters has his
or her soliloquies speculating about death or expressing a desire to know death. Over time
Harue Karasawa (Koyuki) emerges as the mostly asexual, could-have-been love interest for
Kawashima. Both have panic attacks, swoon, look dejected, and otherwise act out the
motions of youthful lebensangst. But the film is far too metaphorical for any real
flesh-and-blood human emotions. The film’s primary intent seems to be to transform
contemporary computer-manic society into a metaphysical metaphor. Even as people
disappear, the lights are always on, desktop computers switch themselves on and launch
connections to the web, empty subway trains speed through the night automatically, all of
this an elaborate ghost-in-the-machine metaphor, in which the ghosts seek to escape the
machine.
The timbre of Pulse seems to echo the all-out dread-fear of Cold
War-era nuclear holocaust films of the 1950s, but via the revisionist route (as taken, for
example, in the New Zealand film The
Quiet Earth
The pace of the film seems far too slow. The special effects sometimes fall terribly short. One visual trick
repeated with painful frequency is the insertion of black shadows onto the screen. To
the audience they appear obviously fake digital enhancements. In time, the conceit of
dividing the world up into the real and the supernatural falls short, collapsing
into clever manipulations possible in virtual or digital reality, but not in the real
world. Unfortunately, even the technology, employed to aesthetic end (slow dial-up, jerky
movement caused by poor data-streaming), creates less a sense of visual poetics than of
out-of-date-ness.
- Les Wright
