All you've done is talk about yourself?

Everyman existential middle class pretty much set perfect life family check shelter check security check but stuck hitting your upward mobility ceiling the monotony dissatisfaction of it all smothering you depicted designed manifested as abstract horror is what Chime (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa do so well. Everything about Chime is so clean staged sterile cool blue theory aesthetic average it invents itself as an image system through which the messy visceral outbursts of incomprehensible reprehensible violence evoke the morality of our repressed frustrations with the inessential we bury just beneath our surface. 

     So that’s why the most amazing shot in Chime the dude walking across the bridge high wide crane tracking ext has such an impact. Chime is the promise of cinema we’d hoped for because its economy of purpose doesn’t waste a thing. Each moment is sparse yet charged with significance to be decoded. Even the protagonist a just only slightly good enough cook to teach yet not head chef has the lifelong acquired experience to prepare a course for all to enjoy. Until you discover the tragedy at its soul. 

     Chime is the film I’ve been waiting for my entire life because it does what no other film I’ve ever seen has been able to. It makes slow exciting. Riveting. It demands you to think without spelling everything out until you feel that it already has. The horror of Chime is people who don’t have any reason to worry about their lives. That’s the kind of twist that wakes me up from my cinematic slumber. When that main character bombs his interview the random patron who tries to stab the other diner comparatively isn’t as disturbing. Although we’re made to assume each chime breakdown is the same for everyone we just get made to experience one man’s.

 

What about all the stuff we don’t see? The ghost of AKEMI visiting the academy. What does the teacher see offscreen that we don’t early on the first time he looks toward the entrance to the academy outside? A premonition of what’s to come? What’s the significance of that part of the house with the junk hoard beyond the fringe curtain that precipitates his breakdown? And what does he see when he confronts the terror out on the street? This is the abstract doom we too are confronted with manifested for us to feel.

     Remaining thoughts just gotta throw out there the el train established outside the academy to be used as int strobe light source through window as ominous supernatural capacity rocks. The final climax we get to hear the two note melody door chime is my favorite type of use of establishing sound design and use of familiar liminal nightmare instrument. The way the teacher’s descent shifts to another grain field that makes us feel like we’ve returned to film this is the end.

4/5/2026 4/8/2026 Plaza Theatre

Atlanta, GA