Over the years, many spectators have lamented the fact that Kiyoshi Kurosawa ventured into other genres that horror after firmly establishing himself as a master of J-horror. Yet, his turning away from the genre was not a refusal of horror as such – his horror roots are evident in his other works, but attempt to escape the suffocating classification as a mere master of J-horror.

Yet, spectators who crave a bit of horror by the hand of Kurosawa are in luck. With Chime, Kurosawa offers an update to the horrifying truth of human subjectivity he explored in Cure (1997) and the destabilizing effects of contemporary society on social bonds and subjectivity he investigated in Pulse (2001).

Kurosawa’s horror short follows Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka), a cooking teacher with a thriving class. While most students chat and cook happily together, Tashiro (Seiichi Kohinata), a new student who struggles with limits (e.g. too much salt, chopping the onions too fine) keeps his distance form the others. One day, he is suddenly asked by Tashiro if he can hear the scream-like chime that seems to address him. Non-plussed by his strange enunciations, he demands him to continue his cooking. Yet, little does he know that more strange and disconcerting things will happen to him.

In Chime, Tashiro finds himself on the border that separates the mundane from the threat that slivers under this frail imaginary structure of societal harmony. What makes him a presence that disturbs this frail harmony, an object that, with its presence, ripples the frail equilibrium of the societal field and the ego of others is the fact that he, with his acts and enunciations, underlines that something escapes the eye-screen of mundanity: the dimension of the real.

For the spectator, Tashiro appears as man who is psychotically structured – the scream-chime being an auditory hallucination and the narrative of the machine in his brain a delusional formation to solve the threat that emanates from the chime. Yet, Kurosawa complicates such simple reading by revealing that Matsuoka can also hear a kind of chime.

By reaffirming that the threat does not lie in the subjectivity of the Other, but in an object that lies beyond control of the societal field and the ego, Kurosawa short-circuits the spectator’s pacifying escape into psychology – he was just crazy – and forces him to accept the threat that can, at any time, chime its destructive presence.

So, how can we understand the chime? Is it an internal or an external presence? In our view, the chime is an internalized external element, a signal of the unfathomable real of our drives, the deadly finality of our libidinal life. Chime dismisses and sabotages the psychologizing reflex of the spectator to confront him with the libidinal snakes that coil in the prison of his subjectivity, carefully hidden beneath his ego, the mask which supports the mendacious image of societal harmony.  

However, the chime of our libidinal real manifests itself in two different ways in Kurosawa’s narrative. We encounter the chime as an echoing affirmation of the presence of jouissance as well as its scream-like variant which signals the traumatic dimension of the manifestation of our death drive.

Chime obliquelypoints to the failure of the societal field at curbing our chime, our pulsating drive for jouissance. The blood that spills in Kurosawa’s film etches the unsettling truth that, now more than ever, we are not interested in the Other as subject, but merely seek to utilize him as a complementary object – an object in the same vein as the gadgets and the lathouses the capitalistic machinery produces – to ensure our pleasure and satisfy our thirst for self-importance. The capitalistic machinery, due to its fixation of manufacturing objects to provide fleeting pleasure, has not only hollowed out social bonds, but also accelerated feeing of inferiority – the blossoming of such complexes – and the proliferation of secondary narcissistic positions (Psycho-note 1). This is aptly illustrated in Chime by how Matsuoka interacts with his students and the way he addresses the job-interviewers at Cafe-de-ville.

With his composition, Kurosawa offers a master-class at creating a narrative space whose atmosphere forms the border where the mundane and the threat that lurks beneath that fictional image of harmony meet. Kurosawa confronts the spectator with this imperceptible border by combining three elements: dynamism, sound-design, and colour-design.

However, as Chime proves, the basis of creating such subtly unsettling atmosphere lies in the sound-design. Kurosawa does not merely turn silence into a sensible presence, but into a present signal of the threat that might or might not materialize itself (Sound-note 1). The slow dynamic shots and the long static takes are but subtle confirmations of the absent-presence of a threat – the slowness of the visual pace ripples the frailty of the border between imaginary harmony and real discord and horror (Cine-note 1, Cine-note 2). The extraction of most vivacity from the colours in the narrative spaces reaffirms the frailty of this border, by echoing in a very indirect way that bleak truth of the real lingers among us (Colour-note 1).  

Kurosawa, furthermore, utilizes visual repetition and static long takes to disturb the sense that the narrative unfolds chronologically. As a result, many moments in the narrative become evocative, effective in disturbing the spectator’s desire to understand him and inviting him to confront the raw real that is his own subjective abyss.

With Chime, Kiyoshi Kurosawa proves that he still is a master of horror. He creates an atmosphere that unsettles the spectator with ease and offers, with refined precision, an exploration of the consequence of the ‘imaginarisation’ of social bonds. Fans of J-horror and Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) eat good with Kurosawa’s latest horror outing.  

Psycho-note 1: Secondary narcissism refers to Freud’s distinction between primary and secondary narcissism. While the former is a normal phase in childhood where the infant directs his libido towards his own ego, the latter is a problematic regression tothe self-directed libidinal investment that marks the phase of primary narcissism.

Sound-note 1: Certain sounds within Chime are intrusively loud, further short-circuiting the spectator’s continuous attempt to assume a place to feel at ease. This inability, make no mistake, is one of the elements that allows the spectator to enjoy the narrative.

Cine-note 1: The slow dynamic shots, by virtue of their slowness, fuel the spectator’s expectation and teasingly play with his reluctance to know.

Cine-note 2: Kurosawa also utilizes visual repetition (i.e. Matsuoka’s wife and the bags of empty cans) effectively to strengthen the uneasiness that lingers within the atmosphere.

Colour-note 1: It is not the case that Chime is without any warm colours. However, the warm light that emanates from the various lights in Mr. Matsuoka’s house do little to put the spectator at ease. These reminders of the frail imaginary harmony cannot dispel the dread that lingers within the faded parts of the visual frame.