Kairo

Saw Kairo (AKA Pulse) The mythology behind this J-horror film is that the afterlife is becoming too full and ghosts are leaking into the internet. The ghosts, jealous or hungry for our lives, trap us humans in "loneliness." These lonely human/ghosts are sealed into basements and one-room apartments with ceremonial-seeming red tape. It's a little bit luddite-ish and a little queasy, but it's got something to it. The idea that the shared solitude of the internet is real and infectious is creepy. One character has a clever monologue arguing that digital videos of us are literally our ghosts (ephemeral echoes of our selves, doomed to relive moments of our lives forever.) It's got something to it, but that something is a bit too intellectual and philosophical I think. The film doesn't really give this horror of isolation a kick. The situation is perhaps tragic, but not scary.

The film has moments that are genuinely creepy, often coming from sudden intimacy, such as the several times ghosts whisper "help me" right into our ears. These whispers are not jumps though, just extremely weird and jarring. They work against the central thesis of the film however, that isolation is the horrible thing. There are also a few suicides which are worrying mainly in their casualness. The film also contains a plane crashing into a city and the twice-repeated image of a person with a black sack over their heads. The film's wariness of modernity has several dimensions it seems.

Its ending is a bit muddled, devolving as it does into an almost action-film-like flight from the city, but the beginning is fascinating and creepy, in a dreamlike way. A good film for wimps like me who can take anything so long as it's not sudden. The concept should be refined and reworked (and remade not into a shitty American knock-off with the word "co-eds" in its imdb plot summary.)

Edit: Reading the comments on imdb, I have to add, this film is very brooding and atmospheric. There's a refreshing lack of screaming and super-saturated shakey-cam. The colours are muted and flat. The film is helpless and bleak. It's just a bit muddly-feeling to me.