Kiyoshi Kurosawa's horror films commonly mistake obfuscation for mystery. They are slick films skillful on the surface. But the director has more interest in symbolism & mood than in plot, so they're scarcely worth the effort of trying to figure out what's happening or how it adds up to anything.

Pulse starts off as an effectively eerie if puzzling & never resolved ghost story with computers & the internet becoming haunted.

Much as Romero posits in Night of the Living Dead that when Hell fills up, the dead will walk the earth, Kurosawa posits that when the spirit-world fills up with the souls who have died since the beginning of time, they will seep out into the living world, facilitated it seems by the internet.

Rather than resolve into anything comprehensible, the film piles on layers of new possibilities, vis, the spirit world has an expansionist agenda, launching an intentional attack on the material realm in order to conquer new space for their overcrowded problems. They are inducing a horrific immortality that traps the living in a realm of pure, eternal loneliness.

Much of this is genuinely frightening to ponder, & many of the ghostly effects & continuous visual symbolism regarding loneliness is really very sad & creepy stuff, ever so much more frightful than "boo!" type horrors. Since a clear "explanation" would either destroy the mysteriousness or more likely just be silly, Kiyoshi's tendency to obfuscate is for once more suitable than any plot resolution.

It all develops into an apolcalyptic vision with none of the possibilities proven one way or another. Most of the FX are small & creepy, but at the end there's a fairly large effect of an airline catastrophe, an event symbolizing what must be a million similar catastrophes occurring all around the globe. For humanity has vanished from the material realm, & are likely not very happy wherever they have vanished to. We know nothing more than that, & while such irresolution is frustrating in many of Kiyoshi's films, for this one it's perfect.

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