It would’ve been duly appreciated if Kiyoshi Kurosawa only debuted his Serpent’s Path remake in the near-future; it’s icing on the cake that 2024 will be his most prolific year in some time. Per Screen Daily, he’s just shot a new feature, Chime, that stars Mutsuo Yoshioka (Kurosawa’s Foreboding) as “a schoolteacher whose life is disrupted by a chime that brings with it an increasing sense of dread.” Which sounds in-tune with many of his films, though producer Hideyuki Okamoto––who says its genesis was asking Kurosawa “to make whatever he wanted”––claims it starts “a whole new genre.”
Lest that sound too much like an investor gumming-up interest, we can find some affirmation in Kurosawa’s own statement, retrieved by the Japanese outlet Nordot:
“This is a work that aims to shock the viewer and leave them with a strong sense of fear after watching it. Nothing that is necessary in a normal story is explained. Also, it doesn’t fit into genres like horror or suspense. That’s the aim of this work: a crazy movie, a movie that’s out of this world.”
The publication relayed a bit more plot info: Chime concerns Matsuoka, a cooking instructor whose peculiar student, Tashiro, can hear “some kind of voice” and claims, “Half of my brain has been replaced and I’m a machine.” Likely you’re now getting flashes to Cure‘s Mamiya, an association buttressed by Kurosawa’s elaboration on his protagonist’s situation:
“I tried to tell the story of an ordinary middle-aged man who is woken by a chime and finds himself wandering between the everyday and the surreal. He is afraid. But he has faith. This absurdity is also a kind of freedom that allows him to slip out of the modern society that otherwise binds him through the crevices of its morals, justice, and conscience.”
Expect Chime to appear on the festival circuit in 2024, then exclusively debut on the streaming service Roadstead. Find the first still and poster below:
