i think kiyoshi kurosawa's pulse is one of the gratest films ever made, and way better than cure which most people seem to like more. cure's more distinct in terms of cinematography, but i think pulse is more visually distinct in general because of the washed out color tone and the setting of the film. even though the cinematography style is the same in both films and a lot more pronounced in cure, i think it works better in pulse because just the context of cure being about detectives following a sort of strange bombastic case while pulse is about a bunch of normal students, which to me made the style of it more effective even if it's not as in your face
without going into spoilers or anything, the main themes of pulse on a very surface-level view are computer age loneliness and loss of identity (which sounds really gay but this was 2001 and japanese so it isn't gay) and i think a lot of other directors would either miss the mark completely or come off as patronizing if they made this film. there's a lot more going on than just those themes, but those are the obvious ones that stuck out to me. i don't really know how to talk about films which probably shows in how i haven't actually mentioned a single thing about the plot
a lot of people think pulse is about ghosts and they should all kill themselves and there isn't a single ghost in the whole film. i think the fact that pulse came out just as 2ch was getting incredibly popular and mainstream and it was just a year after the first major crime related to 2ch happened (neomugicha bus hijacking) is not a coincidence
also, a nineteen year old's map is one of my favorite films and probably relevant to a few people here that didn't grow up all coddled. it doesn't have any particularly nice visuals and has a little bit of the feeling of boring old people TV dramas, but i think a few people here might really "GET" that film and especially like the main character