Chime

"There's a machine inside my head." I wasn't exactly sure what I was expecting from Chime. It was my first Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, and at only 45 minutes long, it obviously felt like an experiment more than anything. I had heard people praise Cure and Pulse, so I figured this would be an interesting place to start. What I didn't expect was to spend nearly the entire runtime wondering what the hell was happening. The thing is, I don't think Chime is a film that benefits from being explained too precisely. In fact, I think reducing it to a single interpretation would almost go against what makes it so effective. Yet while watching it, I kept returning to the same idea: routine. Everyone in the film seems trapped in one. They work, they teach, they eat, they repeat. Then suddenly, something breaks. Whether that "something" is supernatural, psychological, or entirely symbolic didn't matter much. What was interesting was the way Kurosawa portrays the collapse itself. One small disturbance enters a person's life, and everything that once seemed stable begins to unravel. I interpreted the chime less as a curse and more as a trigger, as the manifestation of something that was already there, buried deep enough to remain invisible until the right moment. Loneliness, frustration, instability, violence—pick your poison. The film left me with the uncomfortable feeling that nobody is as far away from the edge as they'd like to believe. Just people, and the possibility of what they are capable of when something inside them finally gives way. I also found myself thinking a lot about Matsuoka's situation, not necessarily as a direct explanation, but as another crack in the foundation; the film repeatedly gave me the impression that modern life demands a level of stability that many people only pretend to possess. Visually, it's fantastic. There were moments that oddly reminded me of Parasite in the way everyday spaces are filmed. By the end, I wasn't scared as much as I was unsettled. Also, I still don't know exactly what the chime is.