Pulse (回路, Kairo; "Circuit") is a 2001 Japanese techno-horror film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. The movie was well-received critically and has a cult following. An English-language remake, also titled Pulse, debuted in 2006 and spawned two sequels. The script was also adapted into a novel of the same name by Kurosawa himself.
Plot[]
The plot centers on ghosts invading the world of the living via the Internet. It features two parallel plotlines that eventually converge. In the first, Michi Kudo (Kumiko Asō) has recently moved to Tokyo and begun working at a shop that sells plants. Her co-workers include Junko Sasano, Toshio Yabe, and Taguchi, who has been missing for several days while working on a computer disk for the shop's sales. Michi goes to Taguchi's apartment and finds him distracted and aloof; while Michi is looking for the disk, she notices Taguchi’s apartment is eerily quiet. She then turns back to speak with Taguchi and finds him dead after hanging himself, his corpse visibly decaying making Michi question who was she talking to initially. Michi and her friends inspect the disk he left behind and discover it contains an image of Taguchi staring into his own computer monitor, on which Taguchi staring into his monitor can be seen - creating an endless series of images. In the other monitor on his desk, they discover a ghostly face staring out into Taguchi's room.
Yabe receives a phone call and hears a distorted voice saying "help me". Upon checking his phone, he sees the same image found on Taguchi's disk. He goes to Taguchi's apartment and sees a black stain on the wall where he hanged himself, as well as a paper with "how to make a forbidden room" (akazu no heya no tsukurikata) written on it. He notices a door sealed with red tape and enters it, where he encounters a ghost. Yabe becomes depressed and tells Michi that he saw something horrible in "the forbidden room".
Michi receives a call like the one Yabe got. She goes to check on Yabe and finds a black stain on the wall like the one in Taguchi's apartment. She panics when she realizes Junko has unsealed and entered a "forbidden room". Inside, she witnesses Junko being cornered by a ghost, and rescues her. Junko becomes catatonic from the encounter. She later steps toward the wall and becomes a black stain, which then dissolves and scatters as Michi tries in vain to stop it. Worried, Michi goes to check on her mother, who lives outside Tokyo.
The second plotline follows Ryosuke Kawashima, a university economics student who has recently signed up to a new internet service provider. His computer accesses a website by itself, showing him disturbing images of people alone in dark rooms exhibiting bizarre behavior. That night, Ryosuke wakes up to find his computer on again with the disturbing images displaying and frantically unplugs it. The next day he visits the university computer lab looking for answers and meets Harue Karasawa (Koyuki), a post-graduate computer science student, who suggests he either bookmark the page or screen capture the images for her to examine. Ryosuke attempts to do so, but finds that his computer will not follow his commands. Instead, a video plays of a man with his head in a plastic bag sitting in a room with the words "HELP ME" written all over the walls.
A graduate student who Harue is working with explains to Ryosuke his theory that the souls of the dead have begun to invade the physical world. Harue confides her lifelong feelings of isolation to Ryosuke, then begins acting strangely, suggesting that ghosts would want to trap humans in their own loneliness rather than kill them. Ryosuke tries to escape with her to a faraway place on the train. However, their train stops, and Harue, seized by a desire to return home, runs away. Upon returning to her apartment, she witnesses the man with the plastic bag shoot himself on her computer. Harue then presses the "enter" key and sees a video of herself in the present moment on the screen. As she embraces the invisible figure watching her, Harue happily says that she is "not alone". When Ryosuke makes it to her apartment, she has vanished, leaving behind a black ash-like residue on the wall.
As people begin vanishing in great numbers, evacuations of Tokyo begin, and a full-scale invasion of the Kanto region by the ghosts is underway. Ryosuke meets Michi in her broken-down car, and after helping her repair it, she goes with him to search for Harue. They find Harue in an abandoned factory, who unveils herself by removing a plastic bag from her head, before subsequently shooting herself, mirroring the man she saw on the computer. When Ryosuke and Michi's car runs out of gas, Ryosuke enters the warehouse to search for fuel, carrying a gas can with him. While searching the warehouse, he accidentally drops the can’s cap, which rolls through the open doorway of a "forbidden room". When he walks inside the room to retrieve it, the door locks behind him and he encounters a ghost who insists that it is "real" and tells him that "death was eternal loneliness". Although he tries to resist the ghost's influence, Ryosuke loses the will to live, and Michi drags him to safety. They drive through a deserted, ravaged Tokyo, encountering apocalyptic scenery as well as an American C-130 Hercules military cargo plane that falls out of the sky and explodes. After locating a small motorboat and travelling into Tokyo Bay, the pair are found and brought aboard a ship departing from Tokyo, crewed by a small group of survivors who tell them that similar events are happening worldwide.
Returning to the first scene of the film, Michi and the captain of the ship talk on the lower deck. As the ship heads for Latin America, the captain encourages Michi, telling her that she is doing the right thing by continuing to live. She returns to her room on the ship, where she sees Ryosuke sitting against the wall with his eyes closed. He fades into a shadow as Michi declares that she has found happiness, being alone with her last friend in the world.