Movie reviews
Pulse (2001): the city has started leaving before its people
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse makes internet horror feel less like a monster arriving through a screen than a city slowly losing its ability to hold people together.
Whimsical Woes editorial ·
A haunted website is a neat hook. The scarier idea in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is the city around it: a place that seems to be emptying before anyone can agree on what is happening. The British Film Institute describes the film’s Tokyo as a landscape of wastelands and derelict buildings, with urban desolation mirroring isolation among young internet users. That gives the supernatural premise a strong visual argument. The technology is not simply a doorway for ghosts. It is one more place where people try to reach each other and fail.
The screen is not the whole haunting
Pulse is often remembered for a mysterious website and the frightening possibility of meeting a ghost online. Those details make the fear easy to explain, but the film’s more unsettling move is to widen the frame. Kiyoshi Kurosawa lets disconnection occupy physical space: empty buildings, unfinished places, and stretches of city that feel as if their ordinary purpose has been switched off. The result is not “the internet is evil.” It is the more awkward suggestion that a new channel cannot fix a loneliness that already has a floor plan.
The British Film Institute places Pulse among Kurosawa’s turn-of-the-millennium horror work and points to the bleak industrial topography recurring across his films. Read alongside that observation, the city becomes more than a gloomy backdrop. It makes isolation visible without turning it into a single villain’s clever scheme. The ghost story and the urban image reinforce each other: the more space the film gives its characters, the less that space seems able to bring them together.
A quiet picture can still make a loud claim
That visual patience is a real strength for viewers who like horror that gathers rather than pounces. An unoccupied room or a long view can make an absence feel active. The film trusts an image to keep working after the plot has explained the immediate danger. Artists can study that restraint: do not fill every corner with clues. Sometimes one ordinary feature—a doorway left open, a computer left unattended, a building that seems too large for its few occupants—can carry the whole mood.
There is a limit to this approach. Pulse can feel deliberately diffuse, and its slow pace may frustrate anyone looking for a tidy technology thriller with rules that click into place. Its internet imagery belongs to the early 2000s and does not predict the details of today’s social platforms. The more durable idea is the human one beneath the interface: access to a connection is not the same as feeling accompanied.
For a more investigation-shaped Kurosawa film, our [Cure review](/journal/cure-1997-review) follows a detective story that makes explanation feel unsafe. Pulse lets the surroundings do more of that work. Its empty city is not proof that technology caused alienation; it is a strong visual way to ask what connection can and cannot repair. The haunting lingers in that gap.
Questions from the crypt
What is Pulse (2001) about?
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film follows people encountering strange online phenomena and an increasingly empty city; the BFI describes its two parallel storylines and themes of isolation.
Which version of Pulse does this review discuss?
This entry discusses Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s original 2001 film and its slow, atmospheric approach, not the later American remake.
Is Pulse a fast-paced technology horror movie?
Its emphasis is on atmosphere, urban space, and isolation. Viewers seeking a brisk thriller with fully explained technology may find its slow, diffuse approach challenging.