Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 'Pulse' has gained renewed accessibility through free ad-supported streaming on Philo, emerging from the shadow of more celebrated Japanese horror films. The film follows disconnected groups in Tokyo as supernatural visitors begin appearing, but Kurosawa employs these entities not as conventional horror threats but as manifestations of societal loneliness and human isolation. The haunting serves as a visual language for exploring how disconnection has already fragmented society, with each spectral encounter revealing another crack in social bonds.

The film exhibits striking prescience in depicting the internet as a medium that dissolves rather than strengthens human connection—a commentary made years before digital technology's psychological effects became widely understood. Kurosawa achieves his unsettling effect through careful framing and the exploitation of negative space rather than conventional scares, transforming mundane spaces into psychologically suffocating environments. Thematically, the film's concerns with isolation, technology, and societal fragmentation resonate with later works like Hideo Kojima's 'Death Stranding,' suggesting how these anxieties about disconnection and survival have remained culturally persistent.