Review - Kairo (Pulse)

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Notice anything in that picture? Took a minute for me, too. And then... YIKES. Kairo (Pulse) is filled with shit like that - long, drawn out shots where everything seems okay at first, and then... it changes. The camera might swivel a bit, give you a new angle on the scene. Or something might just appear out of nowhere, hidden and murky amongst the already murky film.

There are so many moments of incredibly staged fright throughout Kairo, I can't help but recommend it. Nevermind that, in the end, a lot of it kinda leaves you scratching your head, and I never once was really clear on what was going on; there are so many beautifully shot, awesome scares, you can't peel your eyes off the screen. The plot has something to do with ghosts using the internet to come back into the world, and how the world of ghosts is full and they have nowhere to go but back here, and they need to clear out the humans. There are lots of sealed off "forbidden rooms" that characters keep entering, only to confront shockingly well-conceived terrors. I can't think of any director who's made ghosts this scary. Often ghosts just seem silly, when you finally get a look at them, which is why I've always found them better when they're left unseen, like in Robert Wise's The Haunting. There were a couple of ghost moments in The Sixth Sense that creeped me out (specifically the lil' Mischa Barton vomiting ghost... yuck), but the ghosts in Kairo exist in long, unbroken shots, often just standing there staring at the camera, and they were consistently terrifying.

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I also admired that the director went all the way with the tale he was telling; that the ghosts essentially devour the world and we are left with a burning empty wasteland in the end. I was suprised, since it began as the relatively modest story of a couple of sets of friends, that it became so epic in scope, with the final stragglers wandering through an on-fire metropolis, with flaming airplanes falling out of the sky.

And while it's good in theory that there were a lot of questions unanswered, and I know when Wes Craven remakes this film and makes the plot ploddingly obvious I'll be annoyed, I still found myself wishing for just a little more detail as to what was happening. By the end, the two characters standing seem to have figured out what was happening and discuss it in the vague terms of people who understand what has happened, leaving the audience with a bit of a disconnect.

But it is a minor complaint. And one I feel kind of shitty for lobbing at a film, since when too many questions are answered in a horror film it always disappoints. There needs to be a balance, between what we know and what we cannot comprehend, the latter imperitive to the basis of us being horrified, yet the former necessary to connect us from scene to scene. There were scenes in Kairo that simply happened, and I'm still not sure where they came from or even if we saw those characters again.

But man, I spent a good majority of the film feeling that thud speed up in my chest.
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