July 14, 2004
Kairo, and those moments out of left field
I love those moments in films that catch the viewer totally off guard. A scene is playing out in normal fashion, but something completely horrible happens and punches you in the gut. One such scene occurs in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo (aka Pulse). The shot in question is pictured here, but I won't give away what happens. There is a special effect of some sort involved, but it is so seamless that I sat there simultaneously shocked and wondering how the shot was pulled off. (Likely something very simple, but simplicity is the key the shot's effectiveness.) It's a moment worthy of the best Val Lewton films of the 1940s.
Like several of the Lewton productions, Kairo is on its surface a horror film, but the genre elements are mostly secondary to Kurosawa's main concerns, those being alienation, the modern technology that facilitates it, and our basic need to not be totally alone in the world. It's a great film, one whose power is difficult to appreciate without actually seeing it. A simple description of its plot does little to convey the thick feeling of dread that permeates the movie. Two plot strands are introduced and will eventually intertwine. In one, three employees of a greenhouse try to make sense of a co-worker's unexpected suicide. In the other young computer novice Kawashima stumbles across a website asking, "Would you like to meet a ghost?" The site shows cryptic images of people alone in their rooms, distraught and haunted. Kawashima brings this site to the attention of a computer teacher at his university and together they investigate. And what does this all have to do with the mysterious rooms around the city that have been sealed up with red construction tape? Kurosawa never fully explains some of these things, leaving it to the viewer to draw conclusions. The mechanics of what is going on (Are ghosts traveling via electricity? Are people committing suicide at an incredibly high rate, or are they simply 'disappearing'?) are less important that the philosophical and basic emotional concerns. In the end, Kurosawa is much more interested in exploring how we interact (or rather, don't) with each other than in providing a traditional horror film. This is not to say that the movie is not scary: a number of sequences are quite chilling.
Kairo is currently unavailable on dvd in North America. Those with multi-region dvd-players can order the Region 3 disc on Hong Kong's Universe label from Poker Industries (or probably some local outlets in NYC). There are no special features on the disc, and the image can be a little murky in the darker scenes, but never so much so that the disc in unwatchable. In fact, it looks quite good for the most part and has phenomenal sound. I reviewed HVE's excellent disc of Kurosawa's Cure back in February for old school Gusto.
Posted by jason at July 14, 2004 10:30 AM
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