Kairo (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)

Pulse walks in the footsteps of the more explicitly horror-centred Ring from three years before, but with its attention only intermittently on where it's going. You can see that as its cast of reclusive youths  struggle to articulate feelings of loneliness before succumbing to a supernaturally driven impulse to commit suicide, which takes over society en masse without explanation, that the director is trying to say something about modern alienation as a private nemesis to distinguish the film from the ranks of apocalyptic cinema. But it's too fuzzily thought out to support much of a message, and the appearances of foreboding spirits from the beyond and technology providing a portal to doom are uninspired plunderings from Hideo Nakata's benchmark hair-raiser.

4/10