Chime (2024, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa): The Face Reflected in a Kitchen Knife

# 0.

A kitchen knife is just as sharp and just as cold, no matter who holds it.

# 1.

Is there really a need to fixate so much on the title? It’s not that sound isn’t important, but even so, the protagonist is Matsuoka. Running a cooking class in a place far from home, he seems to be gripped by a sense of impatience. He tries to escape his predicament, but it does not come easily, and at such moments, an unbecoming side of him slips out. It shows in his restaurant interview, in the way he treats his students, in the scenes where he eats with his family. At times he is impulsive or hurried, at other times astonishingly dry or indifferent, but in fact both are responses grounded in the same state. It is not simply a matter of temperament. Most likely, the careful way he cooks is his true self. His impatience is closer to a “state” than a “disposition.” Matsuoka is not someone who “feels” impatience, but someone who is “situated within” it.

The director names Matsuoka’s story “chime.” If the aim were merely to express fear through sound, as if to unsettle the audience throughout, “sound” would have sufficed, but that is not the choice made. There must be a reason. A chime is a sound that calls, presupposing an inside that is tightly closed and an outside that seeks to intrude. As established earlier, Matsuoka appears to be someone situated within impatience, so the outside consists of everything that assaults that impatience: the cold, sterile kitchen; the loud, disorienting noise of trains; the murmuring students in the stairwell; the wife stacking and drinking canned beverages; the son casually asking for money; the indifferent restaurant interview; Tashiro, who stabbed his own head; the woman who cannot even properly prepare a single chicken; and the detective loitering near the academy.

# 2.

Impatience is something Matsuoka himself has produced, and so the chime, too, is something he has produced. The detective, after all, does nothing but wander and resolves nothing. The ghost exists only in the testimony of one student; in reality, there is only an empty chair. The family’s problems are vague and lead nowhere. Not all students in a cooking class can be proactive; a running train has no emotion; a failed interview is an entirely ordinary occurrence — yet in all these moments, he hears the ringing. Thus the chime cannot be attributed to any single object. A stimulus without a knowable origin cannot carry meaning. Having been swallowed by it, every chime operates upon him with the same quality and intensity; his impulsive murder lacks context, and, in contrast to that impulse, the act of killing is astonishingly dry. It is not a matter of what is wrong, but of a state in which everything functions as a problem. The moment the chime becomes the kitchen knife that threatens him, the knife is just as sharp and just as cold, no matter who holds it.

What if I end up killing someone. What if the woman I killed returns as a ghost. What if the body is discovered and that detective catches me. The summoned impatience mutates into fear and consumes the “inside.” Fear, in turn, absorbs the chill shadow in the corner, the gazes of those who wander, the sharp and melancholic texture of the world, and transfers itself outward. Thus, Chime is neither a film about anxiety nor a film about fear. It is a frightening film because it shows a man, in his anxiety, unable to take his eyes off the mirror.

# 3.

Tashiro drives the first half. He is both the figure who guarantees that Matsuoka has not yet “become that,” and therefore the possibility that he could become that at any moment. The instant that possibility collapses before his eyes, an irreversible, uncontrollable chime is pressed, and Matsuoka, who had been precariously maintaining balance, loses it and tilts irreparably, accelerating in that direction. The outside of the house in the ending is a landscape that is ordinary yet not ordinary. It is not that the world has changed, but that the one who perceives the world has changed, and in that sense, it is distinctly Kiyoshi Kurosawa-like. To me, it belongs to Matsuoka, and at the same time resembles the landscape of Tashiro, who drove a kitchen knife into his own head. Having returned inside and gazed into the deep darkness, will Matsuoka meet ruin like Tashiro, or will he find a thread that unravels this repression. I do not know. What is frightening, however, is whether that image might ring the chime of my own impatience.