Pulse

When Kurosawa Kiyoshi first came to Rotterdam for the international première of Cure (1997), he often had to explain that he was not related to Akira. Since then all his films (and he works hard) have been screened at the major international festivals and his fan base grows by the day. Pulse is a new high point in his oeuvre.A freighter in an endless ocean. In vain, the captain seeks contact with the shore. Among the few people aboard is a young woman, Michi. She starts her story. When she was working for a small company and visited a friend she hadn’t heard from in a while, she found him home. But not much later, he hung himself. On the wall was a strange black patch, as if there had been a huge short circuit. His friends search the apartment and find a diskette that seems to have a strange virus. Is there any link with the suicide? A young man looking for games on the Internet, puts the diskette in his machine and seems to spy on the boring life of total strangers with a webcam. A message appears: ‘Do you want to meet a ghost?’Within the genre of teenagerandtechnology horror, modern means of communication are often autonomous threats. In Pulse, they form part of human inadequacy that thus comes to light in its very worrying and complex loneliness.