Countess Barbara De Ath dressed in latex finery and buckled platform boots lounges on Amber Beach under the gibbous moon.

That premise might sound like just another entry in Japan's early-2000s supernatural horror boom, but Kurosawa is chasing something entirely different. The entities in Pulse aren't interested in elaborate scares or shocking deaths, but serve as manifestations of loneliness. Every haunting feels like another crack opening in society, exposing people already isolated long before the supernatural arrived.