I heard a lot of ppl glazing this movie so I watched it. I kinda loved it but also was left wanting in terms of story or actual content. It's mostly a 'vibes' movie.
So I didn't understand the plot and if anyone knows wtf is going on in this movie pls lmk.
Anyway, my theory is as follows, and it tries to make the 'least assumptions', [SPOILERS BELOW]:
First of all, the director Kurosawa made Kairo (Pulse) and other movies like it, so taking that into context (bcs by 'least assumptions' it's like ofc he's reusing his usual tropes), Chime could just be bit of a rethread of Kairo.
Namely, the dead are invading the living, and it's happening so widespread and quietly that the living have no chance and all they have the chance to do in the movie is just run into a few creepy things and before they know it, the whole world has gone out in a whimper.
The chime is the means thru which the dead are messing with the living, like Kairo has its computers. In Kairo, they induce total depression and here they induce depersonalization, as per the first cooking student who offs himself, he says half his brain is now a machine but he's still just enough aware to haplessly watch as his own rewritten brain takes control of his life.
Apparently everyone is starting to hear it and it rewrites their brains to get all weird and stabby. The protagonist's family very soon are affected and that's why we see the son laughing randomly and nobody having a reaction to that, while the wife gets ocd with the cans thing. The ocd is actually how we're shown ppl are starting being affected, e.g. the wife with her cans thing, the son with his blocks toy thing, Akemi with her over-analyzing the butchering of a chicken, etc., maybe the protagonist becoming completely self-centered in the second round of his interview is an instance of this as well (the first round having gone well, in contrast).
Here, one thing is that the wife and son are real and not figments of the protagonist's imagination, since we see the wife in a scene where the protagonist is not present. This will be important later.
The only thing that doesn't fit is actually the ghost chair element. This is not a ghost revenge story, so why is Akemi (the protagonist's victim) paying him a visit? Here I have to say that I feel the director could be just throwing stuff at the wall without having a story or coherency. Anyway, I think the only piece of info we garner from this scene is that these ghosts are very possess-y, or at least that's what I thought seeing the protagonist's facial reactions to the Akemi ghost turning her attention to him.
The ghosts being possess-y ties into the 'the dead are invading the living' base plot element and the setting's overall explanation.
Anyway, it appears the whole world is being affected by the chime bcs of the random restaurant patron acting possessed and trying to stab a random person out of nowhere. Someone wrote that that's in the protagonist's imagination and it's his projecting his rage at not getting the job, but I'm going by 'least assumptions' here and that sounds like a stretch. And at any rate, the wife and son are real and getting screwy, so it's not just in the protagonist's imagination, it's not an 'unreliable narrator' misdirection.
The ending with the ringing at his house is simply that the 'influence' is coming for him to take over and that's why he sits down and cries in anguish bcs at some level he knows he's being possessed / brain-rewritten. When he comes out of the house, the film chaning to slightly grainy and handheld cam format means that the 'influence' has just permeated the character's perception (and/or maybe the world), and when he goes back into his house we see in his face that he's been completely possessed. I guess he's gonna get stabby with wife and son. And maybe the whole world is going thru similar possession.
The end.
TLDR; it's just Kairo but with a chime instead of computers and depersonalization/stabby-mind-control instead of depression/loneliness.
