Chime – Berlinale Review

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is back on his Cure tip and playing games with horror tropes and audiovisual signifiers. His new film, Chime, shows a steadfast refusal to collapse into a coherent rationality. Destabilise that shit, girl, go off.

★★★★½

Chime is a 45-minute psychological horror piece that combines the commonplace—a kitchen, cooking classes—with a growing sense of dread that escalates with every glance at a seemingly innocuous kitchen knife. Takuji (Mutsuo Yoshioka, showing an enigmatic detachment) is a cooking school teacher whose personal life is as sterile and disconnected as his professional demeanor. When one of his students claims to hear a mysterious chime-like noise, this seems to trigger a series of unsettling events, causing Takuji’s sanity to unravel. Or is it the world around him that is coming apart?

Kurosawa is absolutely on top of his horror game, showing complete control of his craft: the tone, texture and rhythms are all masterfully handled, delivering some of the most unsettling vibes you’ll see in a film this year. The director channels the energy of his best work (that is to say, Cure), slyly playing with horror tropes and audiovisual choices, zigging where others would zag, and generally messing with the audience at every turn.

Kurosawa says that this is “a work that aims to shock the viewer and leave them with a strong sense of fear after watching it…. a crazy movie,” and in this he has succeeded. It’s genuinely unsettling, and certainly his best work in horror since 2016’s Retribution and perhaps even since 2001’s Pulse. He once again infuses terror into the fabric of the mundane, in a vision marked by a deliberate stylistic sterility, suggesting a creeping alienation reminiscent Cure, Pulse, and Creepy, but here even more abstracted. This is conveyed through the cold, metallic interior of the student kitchen, and the desolate urban landscapes Takuji wanders through, each contributing to the film’s chilling atmosphere.

The horror of Chime is principally psychological and implied, with some of the film’s most horrifying moments either happening off-screen or being left to the viewer’s imagination. Terror is conjured from the unseen and the unsaid – narrative ellipses, or a character screaming at the sight of something out of frame – making it an effective portrayal of isolation and mental unraveling. Atmospheric tension is bolstered by subtly experimental sound design and cinematography; Kurosawa plays with sudden edits and shifts in digital ISO, and even manipulates room tones, to craft a subliminally disquieting experience.

The peculiar behaviors of Takuji’s family, particularly his wife’s absurdly manic recycling, give the film an eerie ambiance reminiscent of Twin Peaks The Return. Here, as in Lynch’s work, there’s an uncanny texture to reality that suggests things have been diverted down a dark and increasingly dangerous path, leading towards the threat of social and psychological apocalypse. At just 45 minutes Kurosawa seems more than happy to leave things relatively ambiguous, and the film is all the better for is.

Oddly, Chime seems to be coming to something called Roadstead, which is apparently a platform where you can buy limited editions of digital movies and then resell them or rent them on to other people. That, to me, sounds vaguely dystopian already, but we’ll see how it plays out in practice.

Distribution model aside, Chime is a superb testament to Kurosawa’s mastery in handling the ambiguous, unsettling, and nightmarish. I really hope this is indicative of his next feature, a French-language remake of The Serpent’s Path. In the meantime, if you can find a way to see Chime it’s highly recommended!