Grade:        C

Moral:        Life sucks, and then you die, and then it still sucks.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s maddening J-horror cum existentialist cum post-apocalyptic freakout boogaloo comes so tantalizingly close to being an epic masterpiece on cyber-ennui that one wants to champion its particulars and forgive its deficiencies: after all, Pulse is meticulously directed, masterfully lensed, and wonderfully suffocated on its own gloomed-out mood. Therefore, that it’s also so overwrought and unfocused is doubly unfortunate, ultimately making it a movie that plays better in retrospect but, in the act of unspooling, can be downright exasperating.

Though it seems to be flexing itself such to explode the genre from within, the movie’s first act is nevertheless still sacrificed to the alter of J-horror banality, so one has to sit through plenty of reheated Jacob’s Ladder shenanigans and creepy electronics that chirp “tasukete” (‘help me’) from beyond the grave. When positioned to be taken literally, Pulse is as turgid and off-putting as any other entry in the distended, regurgitative J-horror cycle, itself the Nippon equivalent of Hollywood moneybags bullshit (why do you suppose the two complement each other so nicely, thus leading nearly to a 2:1 remake-ratio?). Ringu notwithstanding, J-horror has done more to devalue Japanese cinema than all the Tarantinos in the world (even managing to infantilize Shinya Tsukamoto in the poky Nightmare Detective), and for a long, doddering while, Pulse seems like more of the same.

Then the movie splits open like an overripe melon, spilling its innards in all sorts of unexpected directions. Less ‘twisty’ or surprising then simply a slow march into minimalist / existentialist madness, the movie suddenly clicks into place, its loaded technophobic imagery no longer a cheesy conduit for ghosts, but instead a homological visualization of isolation and lonliness so overloaded as to be depressive in the most literal, physical way. Here, amidst its sweltered-yellow desolation and smoke-belched aftermath, Pulse becomes the most glorious type of movie, in that it is nothing but itself. How another Jacob’s Ladder clone could transmogrify, suddenly and without apology, into a grand-scale allegory of macro-apocalypse as micro-despair is beyond me, but to see the crust of J-horror so forcefully stripped from its flesh is downright enlivening. Again, that it’s nonetheless overstuffed (enough abstruse symbolism for at least three movies, not just one) and achingly overplayed (Japanese scripts tends to involve a lot of rhetorical lamentations) makes it more infuriating than successful, but at its best, Pulse is a stark antithesis to the presumed limitations of genre filmmaking.