“It all began one day, without warning, like this.”
I’d been hoping to watch Chime this week. It’s a new short (45 minute) film by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and I’ve heard it’s a creepy horror film reminiscent of his earlier work, like Kyua (Cure) and Kairo. It’s been a while since Kurosawa made a horror film – 2016’s Kurīpī: Itsuwari no Rinjin (Creepy) – so I was excited. Unfortunately, it turns out that Chime has only been released as a video NFT. Essentially, only a few people “own” a copy of the film, and they can then offer it for sale or rent as they choose. Right now, that’s only via a Japanese company called Roadstead and involves creating an account, finding a version of the release you can afford, and then somehow paying for it in yen. I’ll figure it out eventually – I really do want to see it – but I didn’t manage to sort the process in time for this week’s review.
I was still in a Kiyoshi Kurosawa mood, though, and decided to rewatch the first of his films I can remember seeing.
There was a time there where every Japanese horror movie seemed to get an American remake. Ringu, Ju-On, Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara – all made into relatively big-budget movies with big name American stars (The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water respectively). I’ve seen a bunch of them, but nowhere near all. I recently saw Chakushin Ari (One Missed Call) for the first time, for instance. Pulse was another one that slipped through the cracks for years.
I generally prefer to watch the remakes first, if I can. I find that I almost always prefer the original, and if it’s the last version I see, I don’t end up disappointed. This isn’t always the case – The Ring is pretty damn good all on its own, for instance, but it’s happened often enough that if I watch the original of a film first, I’ll end up avoiding the remake. (Which is why I still haven’t seen Let Me In, though I’ve heard it’s a fairly decent remake of Let the Right One In.)
I’d heard nothing good about the American remake of Kairo, Pulse, despite a screenplay by Wes Craven, so when I finally got around to watching a version, I didn’t even hesitate to start with the original. I remember expecting some sort of variation on the Ringu theme – dead, wet girls with long, dark hair – and being unsettled almost immediately by the mood of the film. That feeling of being unsettled continued throughout the whole movie, and I remember sitting in the dark for a minute afterward, just thinking about it. The technology was dated, but what the film says (or seems to say) about it was still – is still – relevant.
It’s become one of my favorite J-horror films, and Kurosawa one of my favorite Japanese directors.
Medium
I have the Arrow Blu-ray release of Kairo from 2017. It looks good (well, as good as a film intent on being as drab and gray as possible can look) and has a handful of decent extras. I’d dearly love a commentary track, but I can understand why there isn’t one. Kairo is a personal experience, and your understanding of it may be completely different from the next viewers.
For streaming options, Kairo is available for free on Plex and Hoopla and for subs on Max, AMC+ and the Criterion Channel. It can be rented or purchased from Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango and Microsoft.
Movie
Kairo is bookended in an apocalypse. A freighter makes its way through a dark ocean and a woman on the deck stares out at a landscape wreathed in cloud and smoke. We’ll see her – and this ship – again, but first we’ll get to see what happened to bring her, and the world, to this state.
The film has two separate threads of story that eventually entangle. The first thread follows a group of workers at a rooftop plant shop, while the second focuses on two college students.
The primary character in the first thread is Michi (Kumiko Asô) – the woman we saw in the opening scene – with her friends Junko (Kurume Arisaka) and Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo). They’re expecting a piece of software from another employee, Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), who they haven’t heard from in a few days. Michi goes to visit him and while she looks through his stacks of disks he casually goes around the corner and hangs himself. Later, looking at the disk he made for them, the friends find an image of Taguchi standing next to his stack of monitors, one of which contains the same image, causing an infinite series of the same image. In another monitor they can see what looks like a ghostly face.
The second thread focuses on Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Katô), an economics student. He signs up for internet access using one of those disks that used to come in, like, every magazine ever. (AOL, Yahoo etc.) Whatever service he used, he should totally uninstall, however, because it immediately connects him to some weird shit. People alone in dark rooms, mostly. Ryosuke turns the computer off, but later that night while he’s asleep it turns on again, showing a man in a chair with a plastic bag over his head – before the man can pull the bag off, Kawashima flips out, turning off the computer and unplugging pretty much all the cables. The next day, being a novice in all things internet, he goes to the computer lab for help. Another student, or post-grad, Harue (Koyuke), tries to talk him through capturing the address of the site.
That whole sequence with Kawashima starting up his computer and using the disk was a MAJOR ‘whoa, I’m old’ moment. The sound of the dialup modem, the whole ‘computer service on a disk’ and the Windows 95 interface on every computer – I felt like I was having flashbacks. It really made me appreciate my fiber internet, if nothing else!
There’s a sense of dread that suffuses the action from the opening scene. When Taguchi trails off in mid-conversation and shuffles around the corner, I said aloud, “well, that’s not good.” I could have said it almost constantly, however. There’s just a persistent sense that things are going horribly wrong just out of your range of vision. The color palette is also very washed out and grayish-green in tone, leaving even the brief moments of normality feeling off somehow. In addition, the characters are not fully fleshed out. We don’t really get to know much about them. There’s a distance. An isolation. Given the themes of the film, this seems deliberate.
In both story threads things start to get weird. Yabe gets a call from the dead Taguchi, whose voice pleads ‘help me.’ He goes to Taguchi’s apartment where he sees a black stain on the wall where Taguchi committed suicide – he also finds a crumpled piece of paper with the words ‘the forbidden room’ on it. This appears to refer to a room in the basement of the building with a door that is sealed with red tape. When Yabe goes into the room, he is confronted by what may be a ghost, in one of the most unsettling scenes in the film. This seems to unnerve him completely, and soon he too has vanished into a stain in the wall.
Kawashima, meanwhile, manages to take a screencap of the video with the man in the plastic bag. On the wall behind him the words ‘help me’ are scribbled many times. Harui shows him a computer simulation that shows individual dots that will “die” if they get to close to each other, but if they get too far away from each other, they are inevitably drawn back. Another character suggests that maybe the place where we go when we die, the place the ghosts come from, only has a finite amount of space. That hell is full, in other words, and now the dead walk the earth.
Nothing quite explains why or how the ghosts are killing people – if the afterlife is full, why bring more people over? Wouldn’t ghosts want to help make people immortal – as Harue says? I mean, where are the newly dead going to go? Or are they even killing people at all? Are they only trying to make a connection with the living? To alleviate that eternal loneliness, even if it infects people with that same disconnection?
Whatever the reason, more and more people disappear as the ghosts multiply. There’s an underlying thread about loneliness and isolation in modern life that exacerbates a natural nihilism. The ghosts, it seems to say, indicate that whatever existential angst we feel in life is reflected in the afterlife. “Death is… eternal loneliness,” as one of the ghosts says. The problem for most of the characters is, it’s lonely being alive as well. Confronting the ghosts brings that desire to just stop existing to the front and people either jump from buildings, turn guns on themselves or, in some cases, simply turn into ash and blow away.
The film has lots of layers, and can be viewed as a condemnation of technology, particularly the internet and how its ability to connect us can also lead to isolation and despair. For me, this time around, a lot of it seems to be about depression. How people can mask themselves to others as feeling normal, while underneath the sadness grows. That feeling of being haunted – by expectations, by failures, by absence and loss and isolation – turns, one day, into dreadful action. To those outside it can seem sudden or meaningless, and the cries for help misunderstood or unheard.
The thing about Kairo is that it contains these interpretations and more. There are no easy answers, nor a clear denouement. We’re left with the aftermath, trying to make it all work, trying to get the pieces to fit into a narrative that makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe that’s the point.
Our two main characters, Michi and Kawashima, eventually meet up and try to escape from an increasingly empty and apocalyptic looking city. The question is, is there anywhere to go – and will there be anyone left to greet them if there is? When, finally, Michi finds herself on that boat and the captain (Cure’s Kôji Yakusho) says they have to keep going, as far as they can, it’s supposed to be a moment of hopefulness. That’s all each of us can do in our lives, after all, just go as far as we can.
Kurosawa can’t let that be the last word, though. We’re left with Michi in a stateroom, saying “Now, I’m alone with my last friend in the world, and I’ve found happiness.” Except, sadly, inevitably, she’s the only person in the room.
The Bottom Line
Kairo grows on you. I enjoy it more every time I watch it. It can just be an unsettling and eerie horror movie, or it can have deeper meaning. Yes, it sometimes doesn’t seem to make any sense. The ghosts use the medium of the internet to interact with people, but then they’re also trapped in rooms that get sealed with red tape. Some people look at ghosts and are fine, but others just lose the will to live. None of that matters much to my enjoyment. It’s got plenty of horrifying and startling moments and images – a woman jumps from a tower and the camera follows her all the way down. A plane, on fire, flies overhead to crash in the city. But it’s also a moody meditation on loneliness and isolation and the worry that we’re all just trapped inside our own skulls, unable to ever make a really meaningful connection. Sitting alone in the darkness of my basement, watching this movie via technology I don’t even really understand, it felt a little more potent than it might have otherwise.
