The Internet Is Evil... I Think?

I just finished watching Kairo - the Japanese version of Pulse - and I'm not exactly sure what to make of it. I say that because I don't believe the movie made any damn sense whatsoever. It seems like it's just a compilation of scary visuals, and I think there's some kind of commentary about how the Internet shouldn't be a replacement for real-life social interaction or something like that. I don't really know and I don't really care, because the movie didn't seem like it had a point in the long run.

The movie runs for two hours, and that's way too long for a movie where nothing happens. It just moves from scene to scene without much of anything connecting them. And truth be told, I really had no clue what was going on at any given time. They'll bring something up, then forget it ever existed a few scenes later. And then there's the idea that people are either committing mass suicides or outright vanishing off the face of the earth, but you wouldn't know that from watching the beginning of the movie. Kairo's world seems quite tiny even before the trouble starts brewing, especially when you consider the movie focuses on no other characters but the three or four leads and very rarely shows anything happening in the world around them. Though I guess in a movie about an ever-mounting sense of loneliness, it's only right to have a very small amount of people in it.

But what gets me is that there doesn't really seem to be much of a story being told. As I said, there are lots of plot holes, and while it could probably be blamed on a loss in translation, I grew more and more clueless as the movie progressed. The remake might not have been all that great, but at least it had something resembling a story. But nope, not Kairo. As far as I can tell, there's no true sense of coherence to be found in Kairo, which is sad because everything else about the movie is pretty good. The acting is serviceable, the direction by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira Kurosawa) is very good, and the music composed by Takefumi Haketa is excellent.

The thing is, I don't know exactly how I'd rate Kairo if I was asked to. I liked just about everything, but the thoroughly nonsensical plot really took me out of it, which I'm going to blame on cultural differences. I'm sure somebody understands it, and I doubt it'd be an American. However, I will give Kairo a recommendation to the most devoted of J-Horror fans and as of right now, give it a very confused thumbs-in-the-middle. I might give the movie a second look before I send it back to Netflix, but yeah, I wasn't 100% sold on Kairo. It's not an awful movie, it's just... different.