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100If one masterpiece were to emerge from the recent glut of generally good quality Japanese horror movie, this chilling apocalyptic ghost story from Kyroshi Kurosawa is it.
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100Kurosawa leaves much of the explanation enigmatic but he fills the film with an eerie emptiness, where suicides erupt out of nowhere and mankind dissolves in an oily smudge of hopelessness, adrift between life and death.
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90The 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.
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88It's a horror movie for aficionados. But it's also for people who don't usually like horror movies at all, who regard them as cheap, crude and over-obvious.There's nothing cheap or crude in Pulse," a fine, shivery movie about the terror of solitude and emptiness.
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80Whether you take it as horror show or social commentary (or both), this is sublimely terrifying stuff.
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80Storytelling clarity has never been a Kurosawa strong suit, yet Pulse baffles even under those standards, so it's best to just get on his abstract wavelength and ride the thing out.
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80Like the best horror movies, it doesn't beat you over the head, splatter you, or fold, spindle and mutilate you. Rather, slowly and subtly, it creeps you out. You may go home and throw out your computer and lock the doors.
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75Just know that Pulse possesses the dark art to make your pulse pound and your hair stand on end -- with no cheating.
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75Pleasantly free of blood and guts, with Kurosawa using instead the mighty power of suggestion to give Pulse an invigorating aura of menace.
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75Where the average Japanese horror flick is petulant and nasty, Pulse is dolorous, shivery, and surreal.
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70Neither linear nor overly explained, Pulse completely dispenses with smash cuts, cymbal crashes and other editing tricks of the horror trade.
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70Result is always watchable, occasionally creepy and teasingly pitched halfway between a genre riff and a genuine scarefest.
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67The film's ideas are provocative, yet vague and unfully formed. It's much like Pulse itself, which is a bit too long, despite several great sequences.
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60A horror film that scares you to insomnia is good in the sense that it succeeds in what it sets out to do.
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60While not exactly reaching Ring-levels of terror, it's certainly one for connoisseurs of the weird.
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60With very few strong characters and a great many middle shots, Pulse sometimes plods--it's the price of Kurosawa's restraint and his indifference to structure.
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58Nothing in the two snail-paced hours of Pulse makes close to a shred of sense?
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50Pulse works as a hypnotic meditation on contemporary alienation. Traditional horror fans, however, will search in vain for signs of life.
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50It's an apocalyptic ghost story with some eerie images and a surprising turn toward the end, but it bogs down considerably between the good scenes.
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50It's arguably more "artful" to move at a snail's pace, but at the risk of tedium?
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30But the big scare scenes seem particularly isolated here, supported by neither the flat characters nor the vague plot.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 14
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Mixed: 1 out of 14
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Negative: 5 out of 14
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