In the Flesh: Pulse (2001)

Little of what occurs in the first hour and a half of Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s seminal 2001 techno-horror flick, involves special effects of any kind. Aside from a single moment-long glimpse of an impressively real prosthetic throat, the rest is shadow and light, makeup and performance. It’s a high-tech thriller about cultural anxieties around isolation and aging sublimated into the more palatably intrusive presence of internet technology made with the lightest possible technological touch, its production more theatrical than cinematic. Its sets are richly detailed but unassuming, full of the cramped and highly personalized spaces which dominate so much of the period in film about Tokyo’s high rises. Its leads, Kumiko Asō as the practical Michi and Haruhiko Kato as clueless college student Ryosuke, are understated, unobtrusive in the midst of the creeping unease which dominates the film’s first two acts.

There are heavy traces of Ringu in Pulse’s tale of ghostly presences making contact with the living through the internet, a similar sense of technology as a cursed and irrevocable medium, but the visual language of Pulse’s phantoms is entirely separate, vested not in the grainy black and white neverland of VHS but in the low-fi haze of early modern computing. Screens dominate the movie’s first two thirds, lurking in the background of nearly ever shot and offering cryptic Videodrome-style glimpses of another world, one characterized by alienation, loneliness, and sudden acts of inexplicable violence. The recurring image of a figure pulling a visually impossible to parse covering off of its head leverages the indistinct imaging of the medium with eerie brilliance, transforming the mundane into the transcendent.

By the time special effects enter the equation, with decidedly mixed results, Pulse’s thesis and atmosphere are so strongly entrenched that even iffy particle effects and the poorly-CGI’d crisis image of a US Air Force cargo plane plummeting in flames from the sky coast on the film’s oily slick of unease. It seems appropriate that only once reality truly begins to disintegrate do modern special effects come into play, and Kurosawa is judicious with their use, seldom overplaying his hand as he sketches shot after shot of Tokyo’s tumorous little patches of urban decay. Not a single frame of Pulse feels unintentional or less than carefully constructed, and even as the film’s scale expands radically in its last act this gorgeous craftsmanship maintains a paradoxical feeling of intimacy, a closeness to the unraveling of the lie of human connection, the essential untruth that anyone is ever anything but alone.