Seriously, if you have half a brain, this is the most subversively haunting and C R E E P Y film ever made. Slashers aren't scary. Hell, run of the mill ghosts aren't even scary. Monsters aren't scary. I'll tell you what's terrifying: LONELINESS.

Didn't reach my expectations; thought I was in for a real creepy movie. Sure, some of it had a good vibe to it, and I liked most of the characters, but it felt flat.

And I got lost in the second half due to boredom, unfortunately.

Around the turn of this century, Japan gave us a bunch of ghost stories that intersected with technology (The Ring, The Grudge, One Missed Call), but Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse goes further in grounding things in the existential horror of the new millennium, by equating death and loneliness and crafting an afterlife bursting at the seams, despite each ghost being unable to interact with others, and leaking into our world, bringing a communicable loneliness curse with them. The haunted Internet that seems to be the high-concept premise at the start of the film may merely be a kind of Ouija board to communicate with the spirit world... or is that OUR world, filled with lonely souls itself? Kurosawa's apocalyptic vision is set in cold, urban and industrial spaces, creating a progressively-empty Tokyo as the main characters lose friends and family to - if we track the metaphor - online existence. He was on the cutting edge to have thought this up in 2001.