Thomas’s review published on Letterboxd:
The early days of the internet, when it still had an aura of mystique, stimulated the imagination of artists around the world and for some reason in particular in Japan. I remember how as a child, I loved the Digimon Adventure TV series (1999) and its premise of a secret parallel world filled with possible friends and adventures hiding within the data of the world wide web. Well, two years later, Kiyoshi Kurosawa released a much darker, bleaker, and more terrifying vision of the internet and its impact on humanity, imagining it as a conduit for the haunting ghosts of the modern age. Loneliness, isolation, alienation, numbness, and depression aka the anxieties of the new millennium, further fueled by this terrifying new technology, trigger the apocalypse in this landmark techno-horror classic. Despite its big thematic scope, “Pulse” stays on a very intimate level and remains eerily calm and trancelike. It´s an oppressive mood piece with a creepy sound design and an immensely evocative mise-en-scène. Nobody fills the space in his shots with as much dread and foreboding as Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The most terrifying scenes of the movie are basically the opposite of jump scares. You slowly see the terror come towards you and can´t escape it. The ambiguity and uncanniness of every scenes further adds to the unsettling terror. Similar to Kurosawa´s “Cure”, “Pulse” is a film that makes you feel profoundly unsafe and alone. This quality together with its prescient themes make it one of the defining horror films of the young 21st century.
