Review: Chime

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

At first glance, it’s a perfectly mundane image: the lobby of a public building. You’ve probably occupied hundreds of identical spaces over the course of your lifetime; indeed, the associated sensory details are so intimately familiar that a glimpse alone is enough to evoke them: the texture of the tile floor, the odor of the air conditioner, the faint buzz of the fluorescent lights. The longer your gaze lingers, however, the more unnerving this visual becomes: the doorway looks almost too symmetrical; the sunlight beyond the threshold, meanwhile, is so blindingly bright that the shadows inside seem to distort, taking on a sinister quality. And then, of course, there’s the alcove to the immediate right of the exit. The camera consistently remains at a distance from this nook, concealing it from view—thus giving the audience’s imagination license to fill in the gap. What lurks around that unseen corner? A ghost? A mutilated corpse? A knife-wielding maniac? Alas, the answer eludes us, leaving our curiosity unsatisfied—and the suspense unalleviated.

That’s the psychological horror of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime in a nutshell. Although the film’s lean 45-minute running time provides little opportunity to develop a traditional narrative structure (like many shorts, it emphasizes premise rather than plot), its relative brevity hardly diminishes its deliciously haunting atmosphere. The story, which revolves around a culinary instructor’s rapid mental deterioration following a student’s suicide, unfolds with the surreal, ambiguous logic of a nightmare. The protagonist’s oppressively sterile, claustrophobic surroundings elegantly reflect his internal conflict; the cinematography favors tight, cluttered compositions, isolating the character within fragmented frames, the environment itself threatening to swallow him whole. The exquisite sound design further amplifies these underlying themes of social alienation and emotional suffocation, weaving a rich symphony of ambient noise—the clatter of passing trains, the rattle of aluminum cans tumbling into a plastic recycling bin, the rhythmic thud of a blade hitting a cutting board after slicing through an onion—that ultimately crescendos in a deafening cacophony of urban chaos and industrial decay.

Having languished in obscurity since its initial release as an NFT back in 2024, Chime is finally commercially available in the United States, currently screening at IFC Center (alongside the new 4K restoration of Serpent’s Path, Kurosawa's chilling 1998 revenge drama) courtesy of Janus—albeit exclusively as a theatrical experience, due to the convoluted nature of the movie’s original distribution model (a misguided experiment in manufactured scarcity and collective digital ownership). I highly recommend checking it out; despite the unusual circumstances behind its creation, it is as essential to the director’s body of work as Cure, Pulse, and Tokyo Sonata.