KAIRO (回路)

Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Country of origin: Japan
Starring: Haruhiko Kato, Kumiko Aso, Koyuki, Koji Yakusho


Steering into darker waters, I wanted to clear my palette with some classic "J-Horror". Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (of no relation to Akira) is one of the more proclaimed Japanese horror directors, and kicking things off with his cult classic Kairo seemed appropriate. Subconsciously, I wanted to turn to the horror genre so I could take a break, sit back and watch a little more leisurely. Come to find out, these films would demand just as much from me as any other. Kairo, or Pulse, is truly a chilling film, both in its horrific imagery and its solemn suggestion. Like most of the more refined J-Horror films, a thick sense of suspense is built by the rationed gradient of revealing (or RGR), in which the menacing presence that has been the source of the story's conflict is slowly revealed over several sightings throughout the film. The viewer sees a character react to something, then that something is revealed as a lurking shadow, then later a voice is added, and so on. This subtle device not only hooks the viewer, forming an undeniable curiosity, but also establishes a distinct sense of fear of the unknown. All of the classic Asian horror films like Ringu, Odishun, Ju-On, and Cure have established this narrative technique, which has been mimicked by countless other screamer flicks worldwide. Anyway, Kairo was made during a time where, especially in Asia, the internet was still very new. People weren't completely sure of what it was capable of, and thus it became an easy catalyst of apocalyptians and superstitious people around the world. Kurosawa took this fact and expressed it in his novel turned film. In Kairo ghosts find a way to manipulate the internet and use it as a gate into the living world. People begin disappearing as they are possessed by the ill wills of the spirits and soon the whole of Tokyo is being consumed by the darkness. In the end, the entire city is abandoned, the majority of its millions of inhabitants turned into dark stains on the wall. The suspense-horror turned post-apocalyptic Kairo seems to suggest many things to, in the director's eyes, a very unaware world.

The image that has solidified J-Horror's mainstay in Western culture is the fabled yūrei, or the pale skinned, long black haired woman, often shown crawling or walking in a crippled fashion. To Americans, the image has become a simple source of horror. We were terrified by the young yūrei Cimarra in The Ring and were chilled by the baby version in The Grudge. Both of these remakes (rather rag-tag versions of far superior originals) became famous for this new style of ghosts. But in Japan, the yūrei had been a presence in folk tales and lore for thousands of years. A yūrei was a restless spirit who would often torment humans because some strong emotion existed that would not let them move on. Like so many things in J-Horror films, the yūrei were significant to the Japanese culturally, just like the red tape and the black stains in Kairo. Also throughout the film are countless recounts and suggestions to certain ideologies regarding death and the afterlife. In what seemed to be one of the key scenes of the film, protagonist Kawashima is affirmed by a mysterious classmate that he isn't seeing things, and that "the realm of the afterlife has finite space", and that it was beginning to overflow. Characters in the film seemed to approach the spirits in different ways, some boldly confronting them, some freezing in fear, and others committing suicide. Ironically, all seem to be way in which people confront death and the impending fear that all face at one point of another in their lives. Eventually this fear consumes all of Tokyo are, suggestively, most of the world, and only those wise enough to ignore the fear, to fight it off, pursue on. Obviously less dense versions of meaning can be derived from the film's end, like "don't use the internet", but these days, where we rely on the internet for so many things in our daily life, that meaning seems obsolete. In the end, I found Kario to be an entertaining, thrilling film, and its intellectual messages made it obvious to me why it was screened under Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Kurosawa crafted a different idea, casted a solid core of young actors, added some chilling visuals and music, and ultimately produced a cult classic. If only American horror filmmakers could come up with original ideas like these...

***1/2  / *****