Chime (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

84/100

This movie is...wrong.

I say that with great admiration, obviously, but pretty much every aspect that I'm about to praise could equally be characterized as evidence of ineptitude. Indeed, any single one of them, in the context of a film that otherwise at least seemed to cohere, could be a deal-breaker for me. Which I know for certain because that's precisely my unique, perplexing-to-others experience with Kurosawa's widely acclaimed Cure, which I watched twice 20 years apart and found immensely frustrating both times. Chime plays uncannily as if Kurosawa read my complaints and decided to make the version of Cure that I seemed to be asking for—which is to say, a version that not only eschews any sort of "explanation" for the nightmarish events depicted, but goes even further and declines to make any sense whatsoever on a basic scene-to-scene basis (without quite seeming random). Even its 45-minute runtime* contributes to the overwhelming impression of everything being "off." Nothing here made me want to flee the room (or just turn off the TV), the way that Pulse's couch scene (for lack of a better description) nearly saw me bolt from the Varsity 4 at TIFF 2001 out of sheer terror at the prospect of what wholly inexplicable thing was about to happen, but in a sense, the entire film being inexplicable was even worse.

One of the reasons I didn't watch Chime immediately (as I surely would have 10 or 15 years ago, prior to reluctantly concluding that Pulse had been a one-off) is that I'd gotten the impression of a logline similar to Memoria's, except with a horror bent. "A chef's life is disrupted by a chime that brings with it an increasing sense of dread," reads Letterboxd's précis. Felt like I'd already seen the best possible version of that idea, Memoria being among my ten favorite films of the century to date. But Chime, despite featuring dialogue about a mysterious chime that nobody else can hear, and despite subsequently including the sound of a mysterious chime on the soundtrack (subtly enough that it could be mistaken for ambient scoring), isn't really about a dude being driven mad and/or homicidal by sounds. Or, rather, it both is and isn't that, and (to me, at least) becomes frightening in direct proportion to how strenuously it avoids taking the shape that it's very clearly "supposed to." For one thing, Chime's most notable act of violence isn't directly precipitated by the chime, nor is it preceded by any indication that Mr. Matsuoka has been affected by having heard said chime (which we don't even see him hear, if you follow me—he doesn't respond in any way). In fact, the weirdest thing we see him do—stare curiously, for no apparent reason (possibly it's a premonition, though if so I've never before seen one so oddly indistinct), at a totally nondescript area around the side of the building where he teaches—occurs before the chime is heard. Meanwhile, we the audience are flat-out assaulted, multiple times, by the deafening clatter of cans being dumped into the family's recycling bin out on the back patio. How is that related to the chime? I don't know that it is. Does Matsuoka manically chattering his way through a job interview, thereby scuttling his chances to be head chef at a notable restaurant, fit within the framework that's been established by that point, half an hour into a movie that will end 15 minutes later without anything else of note happening? Not to my mind it doesn't. I don't know what's going on with the room full of junk he peers into right before the end. It's unclear to me whether he's aware of what he did after having disposed of the body. At one point, two characters see something that makes them scream bloody murder, and we're given not even the vaguest hint of what that something is. There's a shot of Matsuoka's wife looking crazed while crushing cans. There's a Cure-style viral airborne infection precipitated by nothing visible or audible. There's a creepy-ass Smile-style smile.

I could go on. Point is, those last few sentences read exactly like one of my patented litany-of-utter-nonsense rants, but in this case the film's very nature—its stubborn refusal to coalesce into something graspable—is precisely what's so chilling. That there's no equivalent of Cure's hypnosis here is part of that, but not even close to all of it. I was strangely reminded of another all-time favorite, Tscherkassky's "Outer Space," in which Barbara Hershey, star of 1982's The Entity, gets attacked by, in essence, the cinematic medium itself. Kurosawa's working in a less overtly avant-garde register, but it still feels to me as if he's weaponizing our basic understanding of how movies are supposed to work. (This is the sort of thing that excites critics who've spent decades in theaters more than it does someone just looking to be pleasantly scared.) Should that come across to you as special pleading, fair enough. I plead guilty to jotting down such pretentious notes as "at the threshold of intelligibility." And because I chose not to read any reviews before writing my own, it's entirely possible that someone has fashioned a grand unified theory that'll have me feeling kinda dumb. But my experience of watching Chime consisted, past a certain point, almost exclusively of not comprehending what the hell it was, even though it superficially resembles things with which I've been intimately familiar for virtually my entire life. Which on some level is as scary as anything gets.

* ANAL-RETENTIVE DURATION CORNER: Chime runs (in the file I watched) exactly 44 minutes and 49 seconds. This provoked an epic solo mental debate regarding whether or not to round it up, as my (somewhat arbitrary) cutoff for feature length has always been 45 minutes. (As I recall, that was based in part on AMPAS rules and in part on the fact that Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, which did not include shorts, did include Sherlock, Jr., at a stated runtime of 45 minutes.) Part of me strongly resisted, on the grounds that rounding up would effectively make my cutoff 44:30 rather than 45:00, which seemed a bit silly. But another, ultimately victorious part of me pointed out that there was currently only one (1) lonely 2024 premiere that I'm truly enthused about (Challengers), and that designating Chime as a feature, which is perfectly defensible, would immediately double that number. Plus, should it ever somehow land a distributor, the vanity logo would probably push it over the finish line. So a feature it shall be.