phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2025

Chime



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2024
Runtime: 45m
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Genre Tags: Horror, Thriller
Plot Summary: A school teacher is woken by a sound that fills him with dread.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: I watched this twice, since it's only 45 minutes long, and I'm still not sure what to think about it. It's purposely cold and clinical, and anything supernatural is never shown or explained. Maybe it's about the intrusive thoughts in your head winning out. Maybe it's about all the noise and distractions in life wearing you down. Maybe it's about not connecting with other human beings. Maybe it's all of that and banal evils of modern life. Whatever you decide, this is a compelling and disconcerting story that will lodge in your head like the chime the characters hear. You never actually hear this chime in the movie, and I hope you never do in real life.


Outside Reviews:

Austen Goslin
The best horror movie of the year so far is a Japanese NFT

With all these elements working in dreadful harmony, Kurosawa has made far and away one of the best horror movies of the year so far, and he sets a more complete and frightening tone in less than half the run time of most of those movies. Like all Kurosawa's movies, Chime isn't necessarily the kind of scary that's going to make you jump in the moment. It's the kind of scary that might wake you up a few days later with an uneasy feeling, with a scene from the movie stuck uncomfortably in your head. In fact, the noise at the center of Chime feels like an almost perfect metaphor for the way its director treats his horror movies. They start quiet and strange, and they echo in your head until it's all you can think about.