Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Dread has a sound in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Chime, a compact Japanese thriller that turns a single unexplained noise into forty-five minutes of mounting unease.
What is Chime about?
A mild-mannered cooking instructor hears a strange chime that no one else seems to notice, and the sound refuses to leave him alone. As his sense of reality frays, ordinary interactions with students and colleagues start to curdle into something stranger. Kurosawa keeps the plot spare, favoring silence and off-kilter framing over exposition, so tension builds from what stays unseen rather than what is shown on screen. The short runtime works in the film's favor, compressing dread into a single unbroken descent rather than stretching a simple premise thin.
Cast & crew
Mutsuo Yoshioka anchors the film as the unraveling teacher, playing confusion and quiet panic without overacting. Seiichi Kohinata, Hana Amano, Junpei Yasui, and Noa Kawazoe round out a small ensemble whose ordinary, understated performances make the encroaching wrongness land harder.
Context & significance
Chime arrives from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a director long associated with a strain of Japanese horror that favors mood and psychology over jump scares, a register he helped define in earlier genre work. This one was made for a shorter format, which explains its brisk forty-five-minute length, and it plays like a concentrated dose of his usual preoccupations: domestic and professional spaces turning hostile, sound as a vector for disturbance, and endings that refuse tidy explanation.
Where & how to watch
Chime is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, presented through a Farsi-language interface and offered with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles for viewers who prefer to follow the story in Persian. The page itself is free to read without signing in; only playback requires an account. K-Time's Persian-focused streaming experience is built for the Iranian diaspora audience, and Kurosawa's slow-burn horror suits a quiet, focused viewing session.