DIRECTOR: Kurosawa Kiyoshi
PRODUCERS: Shimizu Shun, Okuda Seiji, Inoue Ken, Shimoda Atsuyuki
PRODUCTION CO: Daiei
SCREENPLAY: Kurosawa Kiyoshi
​PHOTOGRAPHY: Hayashi Junichirō
EDITOR: Kikuchi Junichi
MUSIC: Haketa Takefumi
WITH: Asō Kumiko (Kudo Michi), Kato Haruhiko (Kawashima Ryūsuke), Koyuki (Karasawa Harue), Arisaka Kurume (Sasano Junko), Matsuo Masatoshi (Yabe Toshio), Takeda Shinji (Yoshizaki)
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​FESTIVALS: Cannes

REVIEWS

“The most horrifying thing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's fiercely original, thrillingly creepy Pulse (released as Kairo, or Circuit, in Japan) is the way the ghosts move. There isn't a single ‘gotcha’ horror-film moment in Pulse…. But there are very few moments that don't evoke a dreamlike dread of the truly unknown.

The story begins at Sunny Plant Sales in Tokyo, where workers are worried about Taguchi, a colleague who owes them a computer disk for a project and hasn't been returning phone calls. One employee, Michi (Kumiko Aso), goes to his apartment to check on him. One minute, Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi) seems fine; the next he has hanged himself. Michi gets out of there, taking the disk, which may contain the most devastating computer virus ever.

As suicide becomes epidemic, and people start disappearing at a disturbing rate (‘Maybe something strange is going on’, one character observes unnecessarily), theories are offered. One is that the mysterious ‘other side’ has finite capacity and suffers from overcrowding. Dead people may be oozing out and entering our world. Or maybe ‘ghosts and people are the same’, as a computer-lab worker says.
All good horror stories are metaphors, and this is one for the painful isolation of contemporary life, but with a literal and chilling proposition: maybe death does not bring welcome oblivion. Maybe, one character suggests, it brings ‘eternal loneliness’ instead.”

– Anita Gates, NY Times

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

​​Dunedin
​Wednesday, 21 May, 7.30pm

Canterbury
​Monday, 23 June, 7.00pm

Auckland   
Monday, 21 July, 6.15pm​

Whanganui
Monday, 04 August, 7.00pm

Wellington   
Monday, 20 October, 6.15pm

​Wellington   
Monday, 20 October, 8.30pm

​Palmerston North   
Wednesday, 05 November, 6.00pm

Hamilton  
Monday, 17 November, 6.30pm
GHOST STORIES >>