Chime (2024)

Shocks as sharp as a knife

Keeping its secrets guarded and living off the shocks of its knife-edge turns, Chime sees Kiyoshi Kurosawa covering more than familiar ground with plenty of desolate moodscapes, recognisable for anyone with even a cursory knowledge of his past output. However, there is something particularly chilling about the oppressive mundanity here, a mundanity to which Kōichi Furuya's digital cinematography adds another layer of dread. It's a dreary madness that slowly begins seeping into the life of its character. Despite its skeletal form and brief runtime, the film ends on a fascinating rupture; the previously ambient evil becoming tangible shifts, terrifyingly, within the realm of possibility and the suggestion of this curse being made concrete becomes overbearing. Relishing in the awful psychological residues of violence while suggesting a lucid dream, the kind of fragmented nightmare you are grateful to wake up from but just as terrified to leave so unresolved.

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A gorgeously-shot slow burn that missed the mark one too many times

I prefer my horror subtle and restrained. I prefer building dread to jump scares and 80s gore. Chime purports to be exactly that on paper. The story of a man who, supposedly, is pushed to the edge by a kind of tell-tale chime.

The length of this short film isn't really the problem. The building dread is accomplished wonderfully. But the plot itself, the characters' identities and traits are such carefully guarded secrets that the ending was more of a "hang on, what?" than "oh, wow, I get it." Which latter clearly was the goal. I'd like to think that I can think fairly abstractly, but the way everything was cloaked made the ambiguity a little too ambiguous. It didn't feel like artful, skilled ambiguity. It felt accidentally too unclear, as if the way in which the director was trying to artistically guide us to the reveal was a little... off. Like a picture that's accidentally a little out of focus. I get it. I get the ending. But it was like we tripped and fell on it accidentally. As such it lacked all the emotional impact that the film was building up to that point. Like someone's telling you a joke and few seconds before the punchline they answer a phone call and by the time they come back to tell you the punch line you've already figured it out.

The other slightly off thing about this film was that a lot of the psychological dread and alarming events felt like horror for the sake of horror. I couldn't see how any of it served to push the plot forward. Looking back on it all as the credits rolled I kind of understood how it fit together, but I was giving the writer a little too much credit, I think. Why the main character was doing the things he was doing made no sense at the time, and thus was very shocking. But even when the credits rolled, even though I could kind of more or less guess why he did those things and behaved that way, there was never enough portrayed on the screen to back up the assumptions I was having to make. I feel like I, the viewer, did seventy percent of the storytelling work.

The final issue is the name itself. The chime figures prominently in the first act, but not for the main character. After that it's only suggested that he even hears it maybe once. We the audience only hear it three times and those times have only loose thematic connections to each other.

The general idea, the story -- insofar as I understood it -- was quite good. The director (about whom I know nothing) is obviously very skilled at this kind of theme. The dread and the discomfort was perfectly constructed.

Ultimately, even though the acting, directing, cinematography, etc, was so excellent and carried out with deft skill, the story was never presented well enough to do any of that -- nor even the story itself -- enough justice.

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