The staff of this florists are waiting for one of their colleagues to get back to them with a disc of information necessary to keep the company going, but no one has heard from him for nearly a week and their deadline is looming. Michi (Kumiko Asô) decides there is only one option: she will visit him and see what's happening with the disc, yet when she reaches his apartment she finds the door open and the place in disarray. There doesn't seem to be anyone about, though the computer is on, but then the owner appears, makes conversation - and hangs himself.
Part of the boom in Japanese horror exported abroad at the turn of the millennium, Pulse was not your usual long-haired spectre advancing on the leading character business, although there was a both a nod to that style and a heavy dose of the supernatural involved. This was director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's meditation on how this brave new world of technology, specifically the internet, was drawing people apart rather than bringing them together, worrying that the more users spent online the more "real" life would suffer.
He took those concerns to extreme lengths, and some would say rather absurd ones at that, but the whole film was reminiscent of a Luddite manifesto, in the original sense of the term, as filtered through the trappings of your basic ghost story. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? From the mysterious netherworld of the Information Superhighway, that's where, and that's where they go as well, making this look somewhat dated even a few short years after its release, by which time everyone had well and truly gotten used to having their online selves be as much a part of their lives as they were in person.
Nevertheless, there was a quiet power to the idea that the more citizens spent with their technology, the less time they would have to spend with actual other people. Already at the beginning of the film there doesn't seem to be a hugely populated society, but there are enough around to suggest a community of sorts. As the story progresses - very slowly - that population vanishes to fashion one of those apocalypses where everyone quietly goes away leaving the chosen few left, desperately trying to hang onto each other in a vain attempt to keep connections strong. For Michi, the entire movie is a flashback of sorts, yet she doesn't know what more she could have done.
There's another main character in this, but she doesn't meet him until nearer the end of the plot, and he is Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô), a student who is intrigued by the possibilities of the internet but ulitmately resists them when his computer keeps logging on to a mystery site that shows fuzzy video pictures of other users who occasionally move - and occasionally commit suicide. Recruiting a tutor who knows what she's talking about, Harue (Koyuki), he investigates only to find he's making things worse both for himself and for her, leading to anxiety, enforced solitude and victims turning into dark stains on walls and the ground. It would be easy to watch this and leave it none the wiser, but the potency of the losing all around you concept, which is something most of us have to face eventually, makes for a subdued, uneasy atmosphere that sometimes gives in to grand gestures via the effects budget. Music by Takefumi Haketa.
