The Sound Of Breaking
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime observes the phantom vibrations of modernity.
It’s fitting that the long-awaited U.S. release of Chime — Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s eerie 45-minute thriller, made in 2024 — comes alongside the equally anticipated Stateside bow of the filmmaker’s 1998 lo-fi landmark Serpent’s Path, which he also recently remade. The horror maestro has a fascinating tendency to extract terrors from the modern world. But as the present charges forward, evolving through changing technology and societal concerns, he also seems to update what he finds most terrifying, if he can even locate a definite answer. Sometimes what’s scariest is a lack of certainty, and in his short feature about a ringing sound that imbues people with violent tendencies, the question of “why” is an endless journey with no clear destination.
In that vein, Chime may as well be a sequel to Kurosawa’s searing, nihilistic 1997 mind-trip Cure, in which a detective tries to make sense of seemingly motivation-less murders that may have hypnotic underpinnings. Here, in his tale of a middle-aged culinary teacher, he turns that mystery inside out by placing us practically in the shoes of mysterious murderers with no clear incentive beyond external stimuli. And yet, the film’s unspooling is far from random. Kurosawa’s filmmaking is observational, and deliberate, with a camera that practically lures his entranced protagonists towards pre-ordained outcomes, as if violence were the inevitable result of the way we exist in contemporary society. That this violence is usually enacted by men upon women (or upon themselves) makes it feel like a psychological pressure cooker, born of patriarchal norms and expectations that go un-remarked upon for far too long. Through numerous interactions, it’s clear that a subtle misogyny is in the ether — a simple assertion, but the film’s embodiment of it is far from straightforward.
The first sounds and images are of machinery neatly tucked away: air conditioners and other vents embedded into the walls and ceiling of Matsuoka’s (Mutsuo Yoshioka) sprawling, sterile kitchen, where he holds cooking classes for adults. Scenes of casual conversations with his students are underscored by rattles and hums that occasionally fade to complete silence, just like moments when Matsuoka steps outside are marked by eerily empty streets. His world is lonely, and it’s hard to put a finger on what’s more chilling: white noise, or the total emptiness of negative space. Technology is everywhere, and the only thing worse might be its total absence, because where there are machines, there are also people. In an urban metropolis, there’s no such thing as escape.
Even when “nothing” seems to happen, Kurosawa builds an audio-visual language from which violence can easily spring, whether gradually or all at once. At first, the focus of this unpredictability is one of Matsuoka’s students, the seemingly unhappy Tashiro (Seiichi Kohinata), whose unusual motions with a kitchen knife are just a hair too aggressive. What’s most disturbing, in these introductory scenes, is the latent possibility of people — men in particular — exploding at the drop of a hat.
Tashiro claims to Matsuoka that he can hear a strange ringing sound, which he calls a “chime,” and it isn’t long before Matsuoka can hear it too. However, rather than unpleasant or destabilizing, this chime is surprisingly melodic, taking the form of a couple of notes that feel ethereal, almost beautiful. That the sound seems to imbue Matsuoka with violent tendencies (or, perhaps, unearth tendencies that already exist) clashes wildly with the alluring form this aural oddity takes, as though the chime were the only thing that made sense in a harsh world with subdued chaos. Perhaps violence is the most tempting release valve.
At home, we see Matsuoka’s banal, disconnected domestic life with his wife and their teenage son, who seems just as untethered from the world as Tashiro is, and just as unpredictable. But Matsuoka, who avoids eye contact with them both, doesn’t notice what’s happening right under his nose, and only seems moved (or more accurately, bothered) by the rattling sounds of his wife recycling soda cans just outside. Without the need for explanation or exposition, Kurosawa uses his soundscape to let us draw our own conclusions about the multitude of ways in which Matsuoka might react to being bothered, an answer that changes the more his behavior and brain chemistry are influenced by the chime. By the time Kurosawa’s otherwise aseptic frame becomes infected with visual noise — the digital static of modern cameras trying to find light in darkened spaces — this minor visual transformation is accompanied by horrifying implications.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa once again taps into a nihilistic quality seen in his films like Cure.
When violence does erupt, it’s matter of fact, and presented with the kind of cold remove that makes the camera itself feel unforgiving and sociopathic. And yet, Kurosawa also imbues his scenes with occasional frenetic movement and rapid editing. These stand out from his otherwise withdrawn visual cadence, jolting us out of any potential calm or comfort. As Matsuoka interviews for a job at a prestigious restaurant, and this process goes awry, what becomes increasingly clear is that whether his altered behavior is something unnatural or innate, it’s so recognizably human that anyone would be forgiven for steering clear of him. And yet, the filmmaking is so enrapturing, and Yoshioka’s performance is so painfully inviting, that it becomes impossible to look away. There are, for instance, moments when he might see things that aren’t actually there, but rather than granting us a reverse shot so we can have some kind of clarity, Kurosawa locks us to his actor’s horrified expression so we can intuit and internalize whatever internal transformations might be taking place, even if they’re temporary.
It’s within these mysteries and “maybes” that Chime finds its real terror. That there’s a connection between the ringing sound and violent actions falls by the wayside, even as a detective becomes involved (à la Kurosawa’s previous work), because what matters here isn’t solving a problem, but rather, that the problem of violence exists at all, and that people can be driven to it by a pervasive malaise. Which is to say: driven not only to violent actions, but the unpleasant, belligerent moods that make the jump to violence all too easy.
Not every audience member is going to witness a stabbing in their lives, though most viewers are likely to have experienced a thud in the pit of their stomachs when laying eyes on someone, perhaps an unhappy middle-aged man, teeming with hostility even during mundane interactions. It’s the kind of encounter that yields curiosities about what their inner lives are like, where they’ve been that week, or what made them this way. The chime, although it presages bloodshed, merely completes a cycle set in motion elsewhere — as though we were all, in our repression and isolation, a mere sonic suggestion away from breaking.
