Pulse

It has been a long time for me to bring myself to watch this one, but is the first fort this year's Transcontinental Tuesdays.

Since I have recently been to Japan I wanted to kick-off this year's foreign films with a Japanese horror I have put off watching for some time. I also wanted to share this one since it was my first experience using hoopla. Hoopla is a free media streaming site through participating public libraries. You can find movies, music and audiobooks to watch and listen to for free with your library membership. They have a lot available that I have not been able to find elsewhere and you are allowed to stream eight items each month. Movies and television episodes can be borrowed for 72 hours, music for 7 days and audiobooks for 21 days. Of course, they also support apps for apple, android and the Kindle Fire so you can have access to your rentals wherever you are. It's a pretty nice program and although it doesn't have as much as Netlfix streaming or its kin, I am sure you'd be able to find something you'd enjoy. Alright, my plug for hoopla is done so back to the review.

For this, you are way cool in my book hoopla

Known as "Kairo" in Japan Pulse is directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and based on his novel of the same title. Sometimes the subtitles blend with the film making them unreadable, which is somewhat annoying. After a group of friends lose a friend to suicide, they discover a disc he had with pictures of him and a ghostly face in his computer monitor. Shortly after, they begin seeing strange things around Japan, there are doors marked with red tape and people are killing themselves after witnessing something terrible. The parallel story-line in the film is of a young man that attempts to connect to the internet, only to be brought to a strange site where people are observed behaving strangely. When he turns the computer off, it turns back on in the middle of the night on a video of a man with a bag over his head and writing on the wall behind him. He goes to the university to ask computer science students about it and makes a friend that tells him ghosts are invading the human world through computers and the internet. Although it is a suspenseful, creepy and entirely unnerving ghost story, it is also a commentary on communication and the alienation and loneliness we experience which is created by modern technology. This gives it a lot more substance than your typical gore fest horror movie, which is nice to have every now and then. Especially for me when I am watching these kinds of movies every day!

Ghost in the machine

My rating: