Chime

It's as if Kiyoshi Kurosawa felt the need to apologise for having delivered something as conventional as Cloud back in 2024. Chime, his forty-five-minute companion short, works as an act of cinematic atonement - a reminder that, since Pulse, Kurosawa has been the director most adept at depicting the silent collapse of Japanese modernity.

But what exactly is that faint tinkling that drives people to commit terrible acts? The background noise of urban civilisation? The pressure we inflict on ourselves just to keep functioning within it? Kurosawa, of course, will never say. Instead, he deploys his usual quiet mastery to let us imagine it for ourselves, piece by piece.

It's all in the details: the slight visual tremors, the tiny disruptions, the shadows that flit across a doorway, the odd smile that lingers too long, the passing daytime hallucination that betrays a tear in the fabric of reality. One can choose to resist Kurosawa's enigmatic approach - or simply surrender, to feel it the way he intends: intuitively, like an invisible, formless predator spreading through society like an oil slick or an epidemic.

Just like in Pulse, in fact.

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.

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.

Let's get things straight: this short is not for everyone. Perhaps even more so than feature-length works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It's mundane, it doesn't care about answering questions or following the traditional rules of storytelling. You shouldn't try to decode it from the point of everyday rationality or even the traditional cinema structure.

Instead, the movie is interested into raising an issue that was already present The Cure, updating it and setting the mood that compliments the idea. From my point of view, it's not so much a movie about depression, but a movie about the virus of violence that infects those who're troubled with their lives. As the movie progresses, we feel that the virus of violence spreads more and more. I think in a current day and age it's a really important idea, because sometimes I feel like the violence starts capturing minds of more and more people even in their everyday life.

The lonely and mundane tone complements this idea by suggesting on how this disconnected, distant and superficial relationships complement the development of the virus.

So yeah, I don't think it's the best of Kurosawa, but still, I feel like it's an interesting and important short movie. Just please, don't try to watch it as a conventional horror movie or even a conventional movie in general.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, once again, is able to craft a suspenseful, slow-paced, and psychological story using his explorative direction choices on the exercise of horror, dread, and terror.

For 45 minutes, it's atmosphere and it's subtle uses of horror and tension is mundane, yet, purposeful in the good ways to crawl right into your skin. What Kurosawa is great with his horror works is that he doesn't use much gore and rather uses the terrifying atmosphere and concept to craft the dreariness and creepiness within his narratives, and this short succeeds with it. Provided with solid performances and a good pacing.

If you like Kurosawa, I recommend it.