Sightlines · reception

How Chime was received

2024 · Kiyoshi Kurosawa · Chime on Sightlines

The arc

It premiered at the 2024 Berlinale as a distribution experiment you could barely actually watch, then word of mouth turned it into one of the year's most talked-about horror films — the consensus 'Kurosawa's back in Cure mode' title almost before most people could see it.

What’s debated

Fans go back and forth on the 45-minute runtime: is it a perfectly compressed nightmare or a sketch that cuts off right when it should begin?

Its footprint

Among horror cinephiles it became instant shorthand for pure, unexplained dread — the 'scariest film of 2024 is 45 minutes long' talking point made the rounds all year.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd-era cult object and proof-of-life for late Kurosawa, routinely called his most frightening work since Cure and Pulse.

Did you know? Chime was the first original production of Roadstead, a Japanese 'digital trading' platform where viewers bought limited digital editions of the film they could later resell — so one of 2024's most acclaimed horror films launched as a Web3 ownership experiment.