Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ‘Chime’ Started as an NFT — It’s Now 2026’s Creepiest Movie You Can Only See in Theaters

An ominous, inexplicable sound that floods dread into your every waking step, and that will eventually drive you to suicide or murder? While that sounds very 2026 as a paranoia-inflected concept, Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s “Chime” actually originated in 2024 as, of all things, an NFT.

Non-fungible tokens have fallen out of fashion, but it meant that, through Japan’s video trading platform Roadstead, users could purchase and “own” the movie, a 45-minute short from the cult filmmaker behind “Cure” and the original “Pulse.” Those who purchased the film, which first premiered at the Berlin Film Festival that year before becoming available in Japan online, could then “rent” out the movie to users at a price point of their choosing.

Thankfully, Janus Films will release Kurosawa’s bone-chilling short at IFC Center in New York City starting this weekend. “Chime” came out of an extremely busy release year for Kurosawa in 2024, with his techno-thriller “Cloud” hitting Venice that fall, “Chime” in Berlin, and “Serpent’s Path” opening in Japan. With “Chime,” the director makes another huge horror statement through such insidiously quiet means that you leave wishing there were even more to the film. That’s, however, what being stalked in your dreams by a 45-minute movie is for.

Kurosawa’s 2024 “Serpent’s Path” is a French-language (and French-in-sensibility) feature remake of his own 1998 low-budget shocker about two men who kidnap a former yakuza, convinced he has kidnapped and murdered one of their children. A new restoration by Kadokawa of the 1998 film will play alongside “Chime” — and while the grindhouse-adjacent “Serpent’s Path” has been distributed online previously in less-burnished forms, “Chime” has otherwise been unavailable in North America legally. “Chime” will also, as Janus Films notes, not be available on streaming or physical media at any point. That’s likely due to its origins as an NFT, even if the concept itself feels so post-COVID early-2020s.

‘Chime’Janus Films

About the film itself. If you’re a Kurosawa fan, particularly of the supernatural serial killer thriller “Cure” and “Pulse,” in which the internet serves as a conduit for ghosts to target the loneliness of its users, then “Chime” will feel like coming home.

Mutsuo Yoshioka (“Cloud”) stars as Mr. Matsuoka, a culinary teacher in a sleek, industrialized pocket of Tokyo, who is trying to restart his career as a professional chef. As “Chime” is only 45 minutes long, however, things get creepy very quickly. A student in Matsuoka’s cooking class tells him with dead eyes, still and cold as a statue, that half his brain has been replaced by a machine that works to communicate with a chime sound only he can hear (or at least, Matsuoka can’t yet). The man then takes a butcher knife and drives it into his jugular, his actions unexplained.

“Chime” is shot with clinical precision by cinematographer Koichi Furuya and employs sound design that evokes barely audible brown noise to a maximally unsettling effect. What unfolds is Matsuoka’s slow unraveling after this event: an errant misjudgment during a job interview makes him wonder what “possessed” him to say such a thing, another student in class is freaked out by how alive-looking a chicken carcass is, and Matsuoka starts to hear the chime noise himself. It sounds like sonar from a supernatural world, a soothing siren call into a warm bath of sinisterness.

‘Chime’Janus Films

Meanwhile, Matsuoka’s speechless wife becomes obsessed with collecting and recycling trash bags filled with plastic cans, crushing them underfoot with a giddy gaze on her face. Then, at a restaurant where Matsuoka has a second job interview, someone else tries to take a knife to another patron. Is the sound an airborne contagion, or something everyone could always hear or sense that’s only now being unbottled?

The connection between the passive wife who is possessed by something ineffable and ineluctable, and the way in which people seem almost preordained here by unseen forces to take a knife to one another or themselves, will remind Kurosawa fans a great deal of “Cure.” In that film, unassuming victims are put into a hypnotic trance by a psychic killer to then do his murdering for him, only for that violence to become even more contagious.

“Chime” is an extension of and play on many of that film’s ideas, and “Cure” has in recent years, thanks to a Criterion re-release and regular play at New York’s Metrograph, risen well above the status of a cult classic video nasty out of Japan.

There’s much more packed into all 45 minutes of “Chime” than deserves to be spoiled, so much so that this mid-length horror movie feels like a pilot to a TV series that doesn’t or won’t exist. It’s also a dispatch from an alienated modern world as only Kurosawa could send out, a film that sure is scarier in the moment, but resonates way more chillingly in the hours and days afterward. “Chime” is the rare film with the capacity to alter your environment, and even make you scared of it.

“Chime” and “Serpent’s Path” play together at New York’s IFC Center starting Friday, March 27. A national rollout will follow, including Los Angeles on Friday, April 10.