Chime

Story: Takuji Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka) teaches at a cooking school. His students are also supposed to learn how to relax a little bit through cooking in order to escape the stress of everyday life. One of his students even signed up just to distract himself from a repeating sound he hears. One day, he then explains that half of his brain was replaced by a machine that responds to the sound. To prove this to his teacher, he stabs himself in the head with a knife. The cooking teacher and the students are in shock and the police soon classify the case as a suicide due to mental health problems. For Matsuoka things are starting to look up again when he cuts a fine figure at a job interview. He wants to work as a chef again. Shortly afterwards, however, someone is secretly killed at the cooking school and the victim is buried. The police therefore show up at the cooking school again and investigate the missing person case. Matsuoka seems to be haunted by violence and more and more strange things are happening around him. Could it have anything to do with the student who took his own life?

Review: Can you really call an only 45 minutes long venture into the horror genre a movie? Difficult to say, but it's definitely three-quarters of an hour that respect the viewer's time. Just long enough to build up a dense, eerie atmosphere and to make you curious about a sequel. It's a shame that we will probably not get one, but the atmosphere of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest work is definitely able to keep up with "Pulse", a small horror masterpiece that took me two attempts to make it work for me, but which was a very special experience. You also have to be willing to fully delve into "Chime". The horror is created by the atmosphere, which always makes you feel like you have passed into some kind of otherworld. The supernatural remains invisible or presents itself in a way that you can only perceive it out of the corner of your eye. Real horror means that your imagination has to fill in the gaps and that's exactly where the director shows his talent again.

Of course, special attention is paid to the background sounds, but you don't hear bells or a chime driving you crazy. That would be far too direct for Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Instead, you sometimes hear some kind of jingle as part of the background music, as if a station announcement were about to come up. In addition, there are also other pretty creepy musical pieces that underline the gripping atmosphere. The sound effects do the rest, so that you have to ask yourself again and again whether this is actually still our reality that you see on screen. The story itself is rather minimalist and cryptic. You can't make sense of the protagonist and even less of his family. There are small actions and incidents that make you wonder whether they are really normal people or rather inhabitants of other worlds who only simulate being human. Anyway, all this is very strange - exactly what the horror aims at.

At the same time, there is always some kind of violence but without any real motive. Or maybe there is a motive, we just never get to see it, or understand it. At some point, you even start to think that violence follows Matsuoka at every turn like a supernatural being. But that's difficult to say, because apart from the detective and a few employees in the cooking school, everyone behaves a bit strangely. There are also a lot of things wrong in Matsuoka's family. In two scenes, the wife brings huge bags of empty cans into the courtyard and empties them into (what's presumably) recycling bins. One of the numerous moments that are somehow strange. But what might look like art-house in a drama creates a subtle horror here. As the director himself once said, his horror is about injecting something alien into an apparently normal world and letting the characters deal with it in this new, strange world.

It's not easy to describe this kind of subtle horror, but it's gripping as long as you can handle the atmosphere. In any case, the characters aren't able take you by the hand and guide you through the story. And there is no real story either. The world of "Chime" is full of secrets that will never be revealed, and with Kurosawa's movies you are aware of this right from the beginning. But the horror always moves just a millimeter below the surface. It is never the use of a knife that creates this horror - and yet things can get quite bloody sometimes too - but, for example, focusing on a curtain on which a creepy light shines and which makes you use your own imagination to figure out what could be hidden behind it. The mixture of direction, music and sound effects takes you into an otherworld, from which you would like to escape immediately, but which also exerts an inexplicable fascination.

The images of "Chime" are razor-sharp and have something sterile about them, especially at the beginning. At the end - perhaps as a reference to the last transition into another world - the style changes to a handheld camera with grainy images. A horror movie like this can only work in the hands of a talented director, as it feeds off of its images and the story told by them between the lines. However, the main criticism is that "Chime" is simply too short. It seems like an experiment or the prelude to a series. And of course, you could also have a problem with the fact that you can't identify with anyone and that there are simply too many questions left unanswered. In the end, though, it would have been nice if we had gotten at least half an hour more of this subtle horror. Because "Chime" is undoubtedly fascinating.

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