Chime

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest psychological horror is a masterful exercise in suspense and terror.

Provided you can get onboard with its enigmatic (and nearly incomprehensible) plot, there's much to enjoy here for fans of the director. The running time is short (only 45 minutes), making this something of a compact version of Kurosawa's usual, subtle horror filmmaking. There's a lot of atmosphere and intrigue present throughout, but little to no answers to some of the film's central questions.

While this is certainly a violent little film, it's not focused on gore, but rather its capability to disturb by mere suggestion. It's pretty great to see Kurosawa back at directing unsettling films that turn the mundane into terrifying, and Chime shows he's still got some interesting ideas to share with the rest of us.

Recommended.

I thought I'd give it a try. A 6.8 on the IMDB is pretty good for a horror movie, and I am a vivid Horror fan, but boy was I duped! It started OK. A Japanese town is shown in quite a depressive looking view. But then...... a knive, and another knive, and lots of cans in plastic bags. Why are there so many cans in plastic bags? I just didn't get it. Did I miss the story somewhere. The movie is 45 minutes, so is the story in the missing minutes. What happened? Why. A teacher who hears a noise, am I deaf. What noise. What the f.... did happen in this movie. Yes, a beautiful tree outside the building. Oh that's the end....what happened. What was I watching?

Keeping its secrets guarded and living off the shocks of its knife-edge turns, Chime sees Kiyoshi Kurosawa covering more than familiar ground with plenty of desolate moodscapes, recognisable for anyone with even a cursory knowledge of his past output. However, there is something particularly chilling about the oppressive mundanity here, a mundanity to which Koichi Furuya's digital cinematography adds another layer of dread. It's a dreary madness that slowly begins seeping into the life of its character. Despite its skeletal form and brief runtime, the film ends on a fascinating rupture; the previously ambient evil becoming tangible shifts, terrifyingly, within the realm of possibility and the suggestion of this curse being made concrete becomes overbearing. Relishing in the awful psychological residues of violence while suggesting a lucid dream, the kind of fragmented nightmare you are grateful to wake up from but just as terrified to leave so unresolved.

Kurosawa proving to us in just 45 minutes that he is still one of the best horror directors working today. Chime is a masterpiece in creating dread and paranoia told through Kurosawa's incredible talent of making the mundane feel absolutely terrifying, by flipping the genre of horror on its head and completely averting audience expectations, creating such a horrifying experience.

Watching this right after Cure highlights how closely they serve as companion pieces to each other. Just like Cure, this produces a spectacular audio-visual storm full of fear and anxiety which lingers in your mind long after it's ended. It offers zero explanation for the audience during the short runtime it gives you, leaving you in complete ambiguity, providing any answers only in interpretation. It creates a sense of reality and normality in some scenes, to be entirely replaced by an abrupt and intensely disturbing act of violence, leaving you unable to trust that any scene is safe. Extremely unsettling and philosophically haunting, one of the best horrors of the year.

Chime: Japanese horror film which is lean and mean, clocks in at 45 minutes. Matsuoka is a teacher at a cookery school, gets some oddball students, they're just amateurs, So he's not that shocked when a student, Tashiro complains about hearing a chime noise. But Tashiro goes on to say that half of his brain is a machine and fatally stabs himself in the neck with a cleaver to display his brain. Then Matsuoka starts to hear the chime and tragic circumstances ensue. Things are in free fall, the chime gets louder, more people hear and react violently. Matsuoka's family, an incompetent detective, Matsuoka's attempts to get a job as a chef all add to a sense of strangeness. It's also implied that Matsuoka has committed other crimes. You'll mull this film over long after the credits toll. Maybe it should have been longer. Written and Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. 7.5/10.