Asian horror has long been one of my blind spots. I’ve only seen a handful of J-horror films and while some of them are among my favorites in the genre (Godzilla, House) I’m left cold by the majority of what I’ve seen. Ichi the Killer? Eh. Audition? I actively dislike it. I Saw the Devil? Getting better, but too disjointed. I’m not sure if it’s a cultural disconnect or some failing on my part (although I somehow managed to avoid everything but The Ring during the American remake of J-horror craze – but I do love that one, and makes me wish Gore Verbinski would take on another horror film). Pulse is often considered the gold standard of modern J-horror, however, so I decided to give it another shot. I’m please to say I enjoy it more than any others I’ve seen, but that’s damning with faint praise. It’s actually a straightforward ghost story, although the film muddles the edges with some pulled-from-the-ass philosophical musings on the spirit world getting too full. More successful are the mournful comparisons of death with life in our modern, disconnected society (it’s a Luddite film at heart, as our hero is a charmingly technophobic slacker), and of the essential loneliness of urban life. Pulse actively eschews any sort of jump scares, aiming for a permeating sense of dread and unease. The sound design helps immensely in this regard – outside of a Lynch film, I’ve not often seen a filmmaker use sound to such an unsettling degree. The hum and drone of hard drives and monitors is omnipresent, even when the characters aren’t surrounded by banks of computers. Ambient noise and atonal orchestral pieces buzz in the ether, sometimes cutting out completely to highlight the isolation our characters feel and, ultimately, long for. That said, the film moves at a downright glacial pace (as slow as a 56k modem, if you want an Internet pun), is over-long by at least 30 minutes, and the vast majority of the characters are blank ciphers (though that may be the point). A mixed bag, but I admire the sickly apocalyptic tone and technical prowess on display.
No comments:
Post a Comment