Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s most chilling film in years will never stream. The only way to see it is exactly as intended: in the dark, with strangers.
- Chime is a 45-minute horror film that will never appear on streaming
- Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the legendary mind behind Cure and Pulse
- The film began as an NFT and is now a theatrical-only cinematic statement
- Chime screens as a double bill alongside the 4K restored Serpent’s Path
The Chime horror film starts in a cooking class. Fluorescent light, the smell of garlic, the quiet routine of knives and heat and instruction. Within minutes, a student tells his teacher he can hear a sound no one else can. Then he takes a knife and kills himself, right there on the kitchen floor. By the time you have processed what you just watched, the film has already moved on. It does not wait for you. Neither does it explain itself. That is the particular genius of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and it is exactly why this film demands to be seen on a big screen, in the dark, with nowhere to look away.
In an era where Dubai audiences, like most global viewers, have grown accustomed to waiting out theatrical releases before catching films on a streaming service from the sofa, Chime represents a pointed refusal of that logic. At the moment there are no plans to digitally or physically release the film outside of the theatrical space, making this theatrical-only distribution a deliberate strike back against the shrinking release windows that have collapsed in the wake of the COVID pandemic. The film began its life, somewhat ironically, as an NFT on a Japanese digital platform. Its migration to the communal experience of the cinema is both a provocation and a correction.
If the name Kiyoshi Kurosawa is new to you, the best entry point is curiosity and the second-best entry point is fear. For decades the director has been regarded as a filmmaker capable of getting beneath your skin like few others working, with a filmography that stretches from the psychological murder-mystery Cure in 1997 through to recent hits including Cloud, each film unpacking the remarkably fragile line between good and evil. His horror does not rely on jump scares or gore for its power. It relies on something more unsettling: the sense that ordinary life, the commute, the classroom, the job interview, is barely containing something violent underneath it.
Chime finds Kurosawa covering familiar ground, and the film’s desolate moodscapes will be recognizable for anyone with even a cursory knowledge of his past output, but there is something particularly chilling about the oppressive mundanity here, a mundanity which the digital cinematography adds another layer of dread to. At 45 minutes it is ruthlessly economical. Shot with clinical precision and employing sound design that evokes barely audible brown noise to a maximally unsettling effect, every scene does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. The restraint is the horror.
The double bill pairing matters too. Serpent’s Path, Kurosawa’s 1998 yakuza revenge thriller, arrives in a new 4K restoration and serves as the grimier, more visceral counterpoint to Chime’s sleek psychological dread. Together they function as a master class in how one director can operate across radically different registers without losing any of his essential strangeness. Two films, one night, one cinema, no streaming option when you get home.
For the UAE’s growing community of art house cinema fans, the ones who showed up for The Green Knight and sat through Memoria and still think about both, Chime is precisely the kind of film worth planning around. It will not come to you. You have to go to it. That is, in 2026, a genuinely rare and worthwhile thing.
Check local cinema listings for screenings near you. Do not wait. With Chime, waiting is not an option.
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Mutsuo Yoshioka, Seiichi Kohinata, Hana Amano
Runtime: 45 minutes (screens as double bill with Serpent’s Path, 4K restoration)
Distribution: Janus Films, theatrical only
