回路 / Kairo / Blu-ray + DVD

Pulse Blu-ray Review

Ghost(s) in the machine.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 11, 2017

The Police released their iconic albumin 1981, scoring a Number One chart placement in the United Kingdom and a Number Two in the United States (hey, you can't have everything, right?), and offering another "take" on the subtext of the album's title with one of the most successful singles of their career, "Spirits in the Material World". Some twenty years later Japanese writer director Kiyoshi Kurosawa approached the same idea of a ghost in the machine with his now famous outing, a film which ultimately gave birth to an American version as well as two sequels. Kurosawa's original film is quite a bit different from the Americanized treatment, though it of course revolves around the same basic conceit, namely that the spirit world is able to "reach out and touch" unsuspecting humans via that little technology known as the internet. There's a really interesting foundational idea underlying this first version ofwhich is frankly largely missing from its Americanized counterpart, an idea which on its face (ghostly or otherwise) would seem to be almost intentionally counter-intuitive. The then still relatively nascent internet was advertised as a force for good, a way to connect people dispersed around the globe, and a technology which could forge a global community. Instead,posits the internet as a force for evil that seems to draw some of its ghostly power from. Over and over again in this frequently disturbing film, folks logging on find themselves alone (at least in the mortal realm), separated from friends and family and forced to confront apparitions that they have no way of understanding, let alone controlling.One of the ways the original Japanese version does in fact resemble its American counterpart is in the underlying paranoiac sensibilities that inform both films. While the Japanesebasically posits two interlocking stories (something the American version doesn't really explore), the entire unfolding of all the plot elements in Kurosawa's prescient vision contain the same almost atavistic fear that so called "progress" in technology may actually lead to our demise. One way where the Japanese version is manifestly different than the American is with regard to kind of quasi- bookending elements featuring what is almost a nightmare vision on a steamer crossing the ocean, which is where Michi Kudo (Kumiko Aso) is introduced.The nightmarish quality of this steamer material (look at the portentous sky in screenshot 6) sets an appropriately angst filled mood that the rest of the film exploits extremely well, especially once the main plot kicks in and a number of acquaintances and/or outright friends of Kudo's begin killing themselves, all evidently after interactions online that seemingly suck their will to live right out of them. Kurosawa's stagings throughout the film emphasize separateness, with characters often spied through wafting curtains or even through what appears to be a "point of view" perspective from within a computer monitor. Over and over again, the individual isolation being experienced by these characters supposedly enjoying the nascent "community" of being online is exploited, giving a lot ofa palpable sense of dread.Thistherefore tends to be a somewhat more "subliminal" experience than the American remake, one that tends to rely on a sense of unease rather than some of the jump cuts with startle effects that dotted the stateside version. There are a number of shocking deaths in this, but perhaps oddly (and no doubt intentionally) it's the almost zombie like emotional tenor of the victimstheir deaths that tend to be the most disturbing. That said, there's very little emotional tether here to any of the characters. The film kind of drifts lethargically through a number of admittedly weird and frightening vignettes, but I doubt few viewers are actually going toall that much as one character after another meet their fate. Of course, many contemporary viewers have been desensitized by decades now of being on the internet, which may be one of the major prophecies Kurosawa andoffered to disbelieving eyes way back in 2001.