Across town young Kawashima, an ecomonics student, realises he has to learn to use computers to get through university unpacks and sets up his PC, clicking through the internet connection and huffing like a newbie at all the clicking and admin he has to do just to get started. He connects but the early 2000's OS does not look like Mac or Windows. On a black screen he sees the words emerge: "Would you like to meet a ghost?" What the hell, why not? It's probably the ISP doing some marketing. What he gets is a split screen of several web cams of people in blobby silhouette moving slowly around their apartments or just sitting at their computers staring at the screen.
Through a process of elimination the six degrees separating Michi from Kawashima vanish like all their friends and they find each other in a city turning into stains on walls, haunted rooms, driving through air that is filled with what look like uncrushed cremation ashes. To where? Wherever.
Kyoshi Kurosawa's apocalypse of loneliness (Kairo in the original Japanese which means circuit which is more appropriate) suggests a world to come will sound like the beeping and popping of billions of old modems as the people slowly harden on the walls and then dry to dust. Unlike other films from the '90s which showed the weaponising of the internet just as people were letting it into the lounge and bedrooms, the internet in Pulse has no malignance of its own, acting only as a conduit between worlds. There is no direct explanation for the ghostification of the world that appears to be coming through the screen, no imagined hyper-corporation or Bond villain, it's more of a phenomenon of a new nature.
Helpdesk woman Harue at the University cannot help newbie Kawashima very much but the computer lab she works in has a strange app running that models human connectedness. It was created by a grad student and she warns Kawashima not to look at it for too long. It looks like a screensaver of the night sky where the constellations move around in the dark. The lab, filled with students in an early scene gets progressively empty in later ones. The pair's own connection seems to be off to a great start until they both go to his apartment and she is compelled to climb the nearby stairs, returning to him minus a lot of her vitality.
One of Michi's friends can't best his curiosity about seeing apartment doors sealed with red gaffer tape so he untapes one and explores the place. In one room there is a vague human shaped stain on the wall which on second look is a woman. As he begins to retreat she walks toward him in a slow but malevolent fashion. And then she stuimbles (but it could be a kind of dance) and keeps advancing. He is backed to the wall and crawls behind a couch but the thing keeps coming. He screams for us.
This scene, often referred to as the stumbling ghost, makes it to a high spot on every scariest scene list that is made from the margins of the genre. It doesn't sound like much but the look, the operatic music and grimy hopelessness of it combine with the sheer lack of control over it we have as its viewers get into our spines. There are several more like it, each with their own special device of terror and they give this mostly quiet film a reputation for singular achievement. Nothing is like it, barring other films by the same director but even they don't approach it for the intensity of its dread. Michi's rescue of Junko actually feels demoralising.
What's the point? Well, as already argued, Kurosawa does not have a beef with information technology or even how it might be exploited by the usual suspects of government or capitalism. This apocalypse is about connection and its decay, the breaking of circuits. While there were forms of proto social media in 2001 like irc and usenet which were heavily populated and in constant use they had nothing of the cultural penetration found later in the decade and onward. But I doubt if Kurosawa has seen a great deal of social improvement from this thing that is so present with us now. 2021's Pulse would simply find the point of entry different only in appearance and more insidious. Then again, why bother when it was both the connection of it and the knowledge that everyone else was depending on it the same way as whole nations became shut-ins. Pulse in 2001 meant more. Kawashima in 2021 is too young to be anything but a native-born citizen of the internet and would never have gone through the frustrations that brought him to Harue.
But that's not to say it doesn't work as well as it did. The notion of the teasing invitation to enter ghosts rooms and the energy draining webcam footage (in one a character starts to walk across a room but the image glitches and starts again creating a loop, it feels crushingly futile or even more crushingly might serve as the last evidence of the person who once was there. If anything, these moments look a lot like the kind of folklore that has grown around the notion itself of the dark web. Hell, why stop there? Youtube is bursting with channels passing home made horror as found footage. It's enough to make Pulse look tame. But it doesn't. Because Pulse is not about the computers but the people who use them and all else beyond whose connection to each other is being ironically deteriorated by communication.
The characters in Pulse are almost all young. The boss at the plant nursery, Michi's mother and the newsreader are the only prominent ones who come to mind and their presence is brief (the newsreader even gets glitched so that half his face is cut off by video noise. The youth of the principal characters is poignant as it is drawn from the hikkmori, the Japanese adolescents and young adults reported to whitdraw not just from the outside world but the space outside their rooms. Various causes have been suggested including a relation to autism spectrum disorder and PTSD but at the time the numbers of hikkimori were reportedly in the millions and looked to commentators like a social phenomenon. Kurosawa was imagining what an epidemic of it might look like. Any number of trival causes might add up to such a withdrawal without the person suffering noticing. Kurosawa adds the notion of ghosts escaping from their existential inertia into the living world as a kind of narrative diesel which he can use to avoid a lot of exposition. The inevitable U.S. remake has characters explain about the red tape as:"It just seems to work somehow." In Pulse someone imagines a situation where the tape used just happened to be a red the first time. The imagined scene suggests the colour took on a significance the same way that people wear lucky socks when they go to the pokies.
I said before that Pulse was unique but that's not quite true. It might seem extraordinary to suggest that the age range of its characters, its release date and location do not admit it into the canon of J-Horror but it really just doesn't behave like Ringu or One Missed Call. While there are three clearly discernable acts to the plot the tension is deliberately scrubbed bare to allow these people space and light enough to wonder at their continued life. One reviewer at the time memorably found it so difficult to describe the style of this film that he called it The Omega Man as directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. He was being funny but he meant it. The only films that this one resembles are its imitators. Those fail the same way that copies of Eraserhead or Possession fail as they don't come from the same compelled statement as the original. That's why Pulse still works, it's still there, sitting by itself, apparently the kind of horror movie ready to get up and dance like all the others but keeping quietly to itself until someone like you approaches it and an act of social charity becomes a meeting you will never forget.
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