Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 回路 (Kairo), released in 2001, arrived not as a conventional ghost story but as a premonition: a slow, suffocating meditation on isolation, technology, and the quiet extinction of human connection. Watching it again twenty-five years later, it remains both eerily prophetic and achingly nostalgic — a film that understood the emotional cost of the digital age before most of us had logged on.

Set in a Tokyo where computers begin opening doors to the afterlife, Pulse frames technology not as a tool but as a conduit for despair. The ghosts here are not vengeful spirits in the traditional sense; they are residues of loneliness, beings who have discovered that even death offers no companionship. Kurosawa’s great insight is that horror does not arrive through violence or spectacle, but through absence — empty rooms, abandoned factories, and human figures slowly fading into smudges on the wall.

This is a film that weaponises space. Corridors stretch too long. Rooms feel cavernous and airless. Characters drift through environments that seem already evacuated of meaning. Kurosawa’s camera rarely rushes. Instead, it waits, allowing dread to ferment in stillness. Few images in early-2000s horror are as indelible as the woman approaching in the factory corridor — a sequence that reduces movement itself to a source of existential terror.

At the time of release, Pulse was often grouped with the J-horror wave that brought Ringu and Ju-on to international attention. Yet Kurosawa’s sensibility was markedly different. Where those films leaned on mythic curses and narrative propulsion, Pulse dissolves plot into atmosphere. It is less concerned with why the ghosts appear than with what their presence reveals about the living.

The film’s central anxiety — that technology would not connect us, but isolate us further — now plays less like science fiction and more like quiet sociology. Kurosawa’s vision of a world where people retreat into screens, lose the ability to touch one another, and eventually vanish altogether, feels uncannily aligned with the psychic landscape of the 2020s. Social media, remote work, algorithmic loneliness: Pulse anticipated them not in mechanics, but in mood.

And yet, there is a tenderness to its pessimism. The film does not rage against modernity; it mourns it. Its characters are not punished for their solitude — they are already wounded by it. Even the apocalypse that unfolds feels less like an invasion than a surrender.

Revisiting Pulse now, one feels both chilled and comforted by its slowness. In an era of accelerated horror and algorithm-driven scares, Kurosawa’s patient, analogue dread feels like a relic from a more contemplative age of genre cinema. The film’s grainy textures, dial-up modems, and empty chat rooms anchor it firmly in the early 2000s, lending it a melancholic nostalgia alongside its enduring relevance.

The Prognosis:

Twenty-five years on, Pulse remains one of the most philosophically unsettling horror films ever made — a ghost story not about death, but about what it means to disappear while still alive.

A rare work that has aged not by becoming obsolete, but by becoming increasingly true.

• Saul Muerte

Five years ago, to mark the film’s twentieth anniversary, the Surgeons of Horror team recorded a special in-depth podcast discussion on Pulse, exploring its themes of isolation, technology, and existential dread in the context of both early-2000s J-horror and the modern digital age. It remains a thoughtful companion piece to Kurosawa’s film — a conversation that deepens appreciation for a work that continues to haunt long after the final frame fades to black.