Kairo (Pulse)

Reviewed by Aricson Tarasova
February 25, 2006

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Studio: Toho Company Ltd. Genre: Sci-Fi horror Website: www.magpictures.com MPAA: R for violent images Review Rating: 4 out of 10

Kairo is about a ghostly invasion from the spirit world as people are slowly being sucked into an eternal cyber-world prison. The story begins as numerous character introductions flood into the first act and then one by one they succumb to the power of despair the ghosts employ. The second act explains the reason the ghosts are invading the physical world because the spirit world has become overpopulated. To stop the living from becoming ghosts themselves the malign spirits imprison the living by using people's loneliness against them and what better way of exploiting someone's loneliness than to use the web? Those spirits are pretty darn smart; too bad the scriptwriter wasn't as smart as his ghosts.

Kairo is a challenge to watch because the narrative relies too heavily on its concepts at the cost of its poorly written characters, implausible plot points and exploitative themes. Kairo has the appearance of a unique artistic expression, but at its core, is cheaply executed filler that crawls the film to a dead pace. The problem with the numerous characters in Kairo is that they are dead to begin with. They are poorly acted with amateur dialog that blends all the characters into one basic personality type. Kairo's one-dimensional characters left me feeling empty and their spiritual deaths were the only time the film got interesting. It's a shame the death scenes add to only about ten minutes from the film's two hour running time.

Koyuki and Haruhiko Kato trying to figure out the plot in Kairo.

When the characters aren't committing suicide, vanishing, or running into ghosts, they sit around and come up with silly scientific and philosophical explanations that bog the film down to a depressive monotony. Scene after boring scene, the narrative tries to take every aspect of the problem without revealing its own motives which makes it confusing, like trying to make sense of quantum physics from a drunk. The soundtrack reinforces the superficial narrative by using clichéd whaling sounds and warped music whenever the supernatural comes to terrify the living. Fear in Kairo is used not as an emotional release but as a reinforcement of the film's subversive themes.

One of the key elements of horror is how the filmmakers tap into social fears of a mass audience. This can be done in both science fiction and horror by extrapolation. First noted by science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, an extrapolation is the means by which to project current social problems or anxiety onto futuristic and/or fantastic situations. An example of this is when filmmakers of the 1950's produced alien invasion movies that exploited fears of a possible Soviet expansion into the United States and converting American democratic society into a Communist totalitarianism. Now I'm not a cultural anthropologist, but I do know a few things about Japan and would like to give my two cents for possible extrapolations found in Kairo and what fears it is exploiting to Japanese audiences.

Japan's biggest economic and cultural concern right now is that Japanese population is drastically declining from a very low birthrate. Japan has the highest ratio of single women in the world who do not want to get married in concern of losing personal freedoms that childrearing would inflict. In Japan today, male and female roles in regards to childrearing are still very traditional, leaving the majority of the work of raising children to women. I think the theme of loneliness in Kairo is a chauvinistic reply to Japanese women's perceived selfish attitudes toward marriage and children. It also reflects masculine fears of loss in both control and gender identity.

According to Japan's Interim Report, Japan must import more than 37 million immigrants over the next forty years, in order to maintain current economic labor production levels, mainly from the overpopulated China. This could extrapolate Kairo's plot points that the spirit world is overpopulated and has begun a subversive invasion into the physical universe. Kairo plays upon Japanese fears of a loss of cultural homogony that a massive immigration from overpopulated Asian countries would bring due to Japan's low birthrate. The way the web is vilified in the film illustrates Japanese fears of identity loss and cultural contamination from mass communication contact with cultures outside of Japan. Kairo's filmmakers use the analogy of people imprisoned into a ‘dead' cyber world as a fear that Japan, as a living culture will become a dead culture only to be read about in media such as through the web.

As of the date this review was written, forty-six critics gave Kairo a seventy-four percent fresh rating on Rottentomatoes.com. Now I would think most of these reviewers are American, so if my above extrapolations were correct, why would American critics admire this film out of its cultural context? After all, America does not have a projected population problem. What fears could an American audience relate from Kairo? America does have a race problem. Birthrates to the historically dominant Anglo population are too low to maintain its superiority to birthrates and immigration of Hispanics and other ethnic groups. There is also a culture war of values in America that audiences can identify in Kairo. I am in the opinion that the majority of American critics whom thought Kairo is an artistic accomplishment did not perceive their own racial and cultural anxieties the film was unconsciously exploiting.

There is also another reason for American appeal to Kairo. Kairo is an example of the sublime of which the Japanese are very sensitive through their psychological understanding of Shinto and Buddhism. The sublime is the experience of vast expanse of energy and power, an almost un-realness from traumatic situations. Japan has a rich artistic history of the expression of the sublime from rock gardens to modern horror that Kairo demonstrates very well. I think that Western audiences that are not use to such artistic expressions of the sublime will come away from Kairo with more than what the film actually is. Kairo exceeds as a Japanese cultural expression of the sublime. As a cinematic narrative however, Kairo is an equivalent to a low budget Hollywood exploitation film playing on racial fears and executed with corrosive hack only the most phony of screenwriters could dictate.

Kairo deserves a Low Evolution Rating for its boring, downright depressing and subversive narrative. To view Kairo in an anthropological perspective is fascinating and disturbing, but as a narrative the film lacks any entertainment value. The DVD features include trailers and a lackluster edit of a ‘making of' featurette that does not shed any light on the film or the filmmakers. The featurette only shows how the filmmakers shot a particular scene. Horror films work best when they allow an audience to express/release their fears, such as in Jaws, Alien or The Ring, not exploit/inflict fears onto an audience of which Kairo achieves to acidic proportions of despair.