beatrice_gangi

My wish would be to finally see Florence Pugh in a film that matches her talent. A Good Person is nothing but another story of guilt and redemption written by someone who seems to have only a vague idea of how human feelings work. Florence Pugh is fantastic, as usual, but this is not enough to make the film anything more than passable.

Besides being mediocre, it is rather simplistic. Guilt and forgiveness are not and should not be easy, moody topics. Besides that, the film also fails to develop many good sub-plots (such as the short meeting with the old schoolmates), introducing them and then quickly throwing them away, bridling in an ending that is as far-fetched as it is hypocritical.

The web is a prolific space for the circulation of what is not properly matter. Indeed, the moving force in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's movie Kairo is an Internet site that shows bleak glimpses of lonely, motionless, grieving, silent, or simply bizarre individuals. Their walls are covered with requests for help. A white script on a black background asks if you want to see a ghost, leaving the feeling that those people no longer belong in this world. Ultimately, Kairo exploits the atmospheres of gruesome scenarios to tell something else, in this case dissecting what may be the most intimate fears of human existence, that is, death and isolation.

The idea at the basis of the film is simple. In one of the first sequences, a software is shown in which dots wander across the screen. If they move too far, a force brings them together again, but if they get too close, they melt and disappear. It is stated how this is a representation of the inner functioning of the world the characters are inhabiting, this meaning that living is no other than being doomed either to disappearance or loneliness. Not only that. For those who come to take their lives, it is common to take their leave with one certainty, that there can be no worse than this. There's no other relief than dying. But, for the spirits of Kairo, death is nothing but the crystallization of their loneliness.

In a genre that has always sought to probe the deepest fears of the human soul, Kurosawa appropriates the primal fear of death by stripping it of any possibility of catharsis. In addition, as early as 2001, the year of the film's production, technology functions as an amplifier of the unease of a society that is decaying in on itself, in a criticism of a modernity that is just slaughtering and eating it up the human being.

And, of course, it is scary. The slow camera movements, jarring music, and constant silences build a palpable tension and claustrophobia that permeates the entire picture. Despite almost zero violence, the apparitions terrify in their sluggish, but ultimately harmless trudging through the scene. Considering the labyrinthine narrative, the suffocating use of cinematic timing, the almost prophetic reflection of modern technology and evaluating the effectiveness of a horror movie by its ability to tear the viewer apart, Kairo is indeed the most disturbing film of the last century.