A self-described "future shrink," Mattie (Kristen Bell) is studying psych at an unnamed urban university. Presumably, this means she wants to be able to talk with people, to help patients and create trust. But she's going through a bad time as "Pulse" begins, worried that her boyfriend Josh (Jonathan Tucker) isn't returning her phone calls, that he's out of touch. Her best friend and roommate Izzie (Christina Milian) urges her to "let go," observing that Mattie and Josh have spent more time breaking up than hooking up. Still, Mattie wants to know what's gone "wrong."
The problem of communication -- along with alienation, isolation, and disconnection -- is at the center of Jim Sonzero's film. Remade from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film, "Kairo," the new version also investigates the costs of technology, but its techno-phobic nightmare is more complex than its storyline. The most obvious intelligence of "Pulse" lies in its look and visceral effect. The imagery throbs, and most every composition is filtered through a gloomy blue pallor, attended by a throbbing and buzzing soundtrack (music and noise).
While it appears to observe Mattie and her friends, like most horror films observe their victims to be, this one is more effectively a study of her interior life, her descent into a sort of abject subjectivity, unable to connect with anyone. By the time Mattie makes the decision to visit Josh in person -- to take the subway to his apartment building and make her way through an ominously dark hallway to his sad-looking front door -- she's already tried to reach him by phone and email, leaving messages that float in the air unanswered.
You already know the sort of trouble Josh has found, as you've seen him in an opening scene, searching for someone named "Ziegler" in the library. The camera tracks him through grim stacks, haunted by shadows and emptiness and flickering fluorescent lights.
Within minutes Josh is assaulted by a long-limbed, cadaverous ghost, vibrating and dissolving at once, computer-generated (literally and figuratively), an amalgamation of fragments that presses up against its victim and sucks the seeming life from him. As Josh succumbs, his face goes pale and he screams, even as the ghost screams and moans, their pervasive pain uniting them.
Mattie doesn't know this as she unlocks Josh's door and pokes through his apartment, murky at midday. She finds his computer on, the screen filled with static, a roach creeping along his kitchen sink and maggots in the warm refrigerator. When Josh appears, briefly, he looks less like himself than the ghost who consumed him, his eyes sunken into his face, his mouth a black smudge.
When Josh mumbles and wanders past her into the bedroom, Mattie hears a dull growl. Opening a closet door, she finds his cat, skeletal and dying (and also plainly animatronic), mewing and snarling as its own life seeps away. It's not precisely a surprise when she follows Josh into the bedroom and finds him hung from a pipe, his sneakers dangling in close-up.
Now, it would seem, Mattie would see the seriousness of the situation, but she and her friends keep on with their lives, imagining Josh was singular rather than symptomatic. Along with Izzie, Mattie consults Stone (Rick Gonzalez), a proud CD pirate and cell phone fiend, and Tim (Samm Levine), shy, fond of Mattie, and easily unnerved (he takes Josh's left-behind advice, to cover all windows and door cracks with red industrial tape, very seriously, eventually holing up in his red room, utterly immobilized). When they find they're still receiving messages from Josh's computer ("helpme"), the friends decide to shut down the machine, as if that will fix things.
Of course it won't. The "virus," as TV reporters describe it, is worldwide, and shuts down system after system, rendering users so pained and fearful, so "unlike themselves," that they're unable to resist the consuming ghosts. The primary ghost, the bald, convulsive figure from the library, is occasionally replaced by what seems to be "personal" figments (Stone loses himself to a woman with long dark hair). Once stricken by a ghost, the electronics user is then afflicted with a black, vein-like stain that spreads from face to neck to torso to arm, its very shiftiness a sign of its implacability. Eventually, humans don't even need to take their own lives, but instead dissolve into surfaces (leaving black vein-like splotches on walls) or dissolve into CGI-ed ash.
While the theme of "Pulse" is familiar -- we're losing our face-to-face capacities by relying on machines to communicate -- the execution is less standard-scary than it is effectively "ooky." The point of view is hardly fixed, as you witness scenes Mattie misses, but it is deeply subjective, as if any access to a screen (cell, computer, or movie) sucks you into the same flattening vortex. The ghosts extrapolate themselves from two dimensions, but instead of becoming solid in human space, they seem to remake that space into their own, their ethereal static reflecting the users' internal states.
It's not exactly sensible, but it's nightmarishly smart. Mattie comes to know it with help, not from her smug, school-assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Waterson (Ron Rifkin), but a good-looking computer geek named Dexter (Ian Somerhalder). Where Waterson chides her for her lack of "self-analysis" and dismisses her suggestion that the sudden "cluster of suicides" might be related to the computer "virus" Josh had discovered, Dexter digs into Josh's hard drive and finds "scary sh*t."
Specifically, Dexter finds what seems a webcam loop, a series of images of lonely, harangued souls, their gaunt faces gazing out from the computer screen, their expressions forlorn, afraid, and overwhelmingly cautionary. One guy has a bag on his head, another cowers against a graffiti-covered wall, and still another points a handgun at his head. All are stuck in their loop, and all lack dimension. They seem about to kill themselves, but at the same time, already dead.
Though Mattie and Dexter do a lot of running in "Pulse," exiting rooms where computer screens flicker ominously, they can't escape the electronic signals that fill the very air they breathe. Long, spooky shots show the vacant campus, or Mattie sitting in a nearly empty lecture hall, taking notes on nothing. When she leaves this non-class and hides in the bathroom, the camera pulls out to show that in the stall next to her sits a ghost, leaning up to the partition just as she does, its face as strained and afraid as hers, but grey and ghastly. The ghost mirrors Mattie and threatens her; even as she thinks she imagines it, she doesn't.
The ghosts, says a half-dead Izzie, "want what they don't have, they want life." And so the film frames its horror as if the ghosts are so many Pinocchios, yearning for what seems inherently valuable. But the film's next step, proposing that the ghosts form another sort of life, and don't just emulate or destroy the life you know, is its more profound possibility. This possibility doesn't emerge from machines. It lurks within users. The film rates as a 5 out of 10.
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