Kurosawa’s horror films are often marked by a malaise that spreads like a virus, governed by a logic that always remains out of reach. Chime follows a broadly similar trajectory: whatever had afflicted Tashiro seems to rub off on Matsuoka, though cracks appear long before the teacher takes his own violent turn. After Tashiro’s suicide, Matsuoka stretches and yawns in the kitchen with insouciant indifference. At home, he mentions nothing of the incident to his wife (Tomoka Tabata), who maintains an air of middle-class normality – that is, until she suddenly rushes from the dinner table to ditch the recycling, performing the chore in a kind of robotic trance.

As the narrative grows increasingly opaque, the film hovers delicately between the ordinary and the uncanny, imbuing every shot with ambiguity. Throughout, Kurosawa conjures his customary dread through the simplest means – a flicker of light, a vague noise, a pan to an empty chair (the film’s closest equivalent to a jump scare) – which might risk ridicule in lesser hands.

All manner of ideas are teased into the mix, ranging from mental illness and career anxiety to ghostly malevolence. None of them can account for just how askew Chime’s quotidian world feels. The film’s chilling thesis is that evil – whether it arises from within or descends from elsewhere – remains fundamentally unknowable.