Chime (2024) Movie Review and Film Summary

Chime Stars Mutsuo Yoshioka and is Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Review: Chime may feel sparse and bare, intentionally so, but few directors can put together a 45 minute film as engaging and constantly unnerving as Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Chime Movie Review

Despite the movie’s brief 45 minute runtime that can make it feel more like a fragmented vignette than a fully fleshed out thriller, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s indelible and melancholic Chime packs enough terror and dread to still make it worthwhile. That runtime trudges along quickly, as the atmospheric slow burn takes ahold after a while and never lets go.

And maybe more so than anything Kurosawa has made, Chime is a movie about formality, as if the esteemed director is simply flexing his horror muscles before working on a project more daring and rigorous next. That is to say that Chime isn’t career defining, but it is reaffirming of the talent Kurosawa continues to maintain all these decades in the industry.

Chime follows culinary schoolteacher Takuji Matsuoka (played by Mutsuo Yoshioka), who experiences multiple events – many onscreen and a possibly few offscreen – the cause him to slowly lose composure of himself. The paranoic atmosphere that surrounds Matsuoka is effortlessly conveyed, even if Kurosawa never uses the titular chime as a gimmick to build suspense.

Which is Chime’s boldest move. You never actually hear the dreaded sound that causes one of his students to inflict violence upon himself and is supposedly being transferred from being to being in an instance. It’s implied, but never relied on. The vibes here are bad enough as is, with Matsuoka’s life crumbling around him both at school and at home.

Chime may feel sparse and bare, intentionally so, but few directors can put together a 45 minute film as engaging and constantly unnerving as Kiyoshi Kurosawa. A companion operating as a side story for many of his great works, Cure and Pulse included, Chime is for the diehard fans of the director, and anyone interested in the latest offerings of supernatural Japanese horror, and lean offerings at that.