Cloud 
クラウド 「Kuraudo」
Release Date: September 27th, 2024
Duration: 123 mins.
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Writer: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Screenplay),
Starring: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Masataka Kubota, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Maho Yamada, Tetsuya Chiba, Yutaka Matsushige,
Website Twitter: @cloudmovie2024 IMDB
Cloud was the third film Kiyoshi Kurosawa released in 2024 following his 45-minute horror experience/experiment Chime and his French remake of his 90s TV crime movie Serpent’s Path.
On its surface, it is a paranoia thriller with a dash of horror via home invasion but it is elevated due to social commentary about the dangerous evolution of how people interact in the capitalist/internet age. To wit, we live in a time when interactions are increasingly engendered by materialism and financial desperation and the quality of interaction is tainted by dehumanising social media.
Weighty ideas are present even if the film start innocuously enough, beginning in Tokyo with our “hero” Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a factory worker who also makes a bit on the side by being a ruthless internet reseller with the user name Ratel. His modus operandi is underpaying for goods of questionable origin and flogging them on internet auction sites.
We first meet Yoshii ripping off a bankrupt factory owner, handing over 90,000 yen for boxes of health devices he sells on for 6 million yen. With that sum in his pocket, he turns down a promotion at the factory offered by a desperate boss (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) and, instead, expands his reselling business by moving into a spacious house in a small village with his highly materialistic girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa). There, he has space for a photo studio and stock storage. He even hires an assistant named Sano (Daiken Okudaira) to help shift more dodgy wares. This change in place comes at the right time since suspicious events are increasingly occurring around him in Tokyo as he seems to be being stalked, both online and off.
The calm of the countryside is meant to be a fresh start but Kurosawa ratchets the tension up further by showing Yoshii is haunted by his online life and the domestic space becomes a site of violence, emotional at first as relationship disharmony happens via Akiko becoming poisonous through disillusionment over the lack of amenities and Yoshii becoming paranoid over being stalked. It becomes physical as the cloud of menace building around Yoshii bursts into a home invasion thriller and then an unpredictable hunting game as complete strangers who have been burned by Yoshii’s business practices seek him out…
There is something almost comical about this reveal, especially the haphazard way the ragtag bunch of antagonists act as Yoshii slips in and out of their clutches, all while film radically changes approach again to become an actioner with chases and shootouts happening around Yoshii. These sequences are more fluid than any Kurosawa has recorded in the past. In films like The Revenge: A Visit From Fate/A Scar that Never Disappears (1997), he has tended to shoot action scenes flat with static cameras, sometimes at an absurdly long distance, with long takes and often with stunted reactions to violence from his actors. Here, he presents something a little more dynamic as action scenes feature concussive cutting between shootists and targets while actors react on larger emotional registers. This ain’t heroic bloodshed but it is action packed and chaotic, especially because the cast of characters are a motley collection of internet losers and the chaos matches their lack of talent.
What stops it from being amusing and keeps it dreadful is that, within this set-up, Kurosawa maintains an intellectual throughline from the first scene of the film to the last: the internet and consumerism has driven everyone to this confrontation. It starts with Yoshii’s online scalper business practices that rip people off and ends with his victims, a collection of losers, being fanaticised by an internet forum to seek out and stream their vengeance via an online hate campaign orchestrated on a Reddit-like thread anyone can join. Somewhere in between, Akiko herself is someone drawn to empty consumerism and corrupted.
We might sympathise with Yoshii in his plight but even he seems monstrous.
Yoshii is at his most impressive when hawking his wares, his face a picture of concentration as he sees sales blink into life, a cold hard ruthlessness making him a perfect businessman but failing him when it comes to human connections. As numerous characters point out, he is acting like a lone wolf and if he is to survive, he needs friends. Amusingly, as the death game gets underway, Yoshii is constantly worried about his computer and merchandise even while the bullets are being fired. Profit means more than personal safety for him.
Masaki Suda is wonderful here. He is an actor who is cast in very emotional roles. Fiery. Here, he tamps his performance down and plays Yoshii with a bluntness and detachedness you find with those who are mercenary. Viewers will probably wince as he cheats people. They may also detect that he is seemingly as empty as Mamiya in Cure (1997), so focussed as he is on profit. He is never really “present” in conversations, always trying to work out the best angle to get an advantage. His choice of home is indicative of a lack of warmth. The house is all steel and glass like an impersonal modern showroom-like space that is as featureless as he is.
The film is tragic in the way that he doesn’t realise the problem with this lack of human feeling until the final sequence, which features a sky of torrid brown and coffee hues with clouds whipped angrily along. It is an apocalyptic backdrop fit for Yoshii realising that the sort of society he fits into is an ugly thing. It’s reminiscent in look and theme of Kurosawa’s 2016 serial-killer thriller Creepy (2016), which was also about people being detached from each other and an ominous sky predicting the end of the world if the family at the heart of the story couldn’t get their act together.
It seems that things have gotten worse in the eight years since that film as it couldn’t be clearer that Kurosawa looks dimly at humans devoted to dehumanised world of tech profit and frayed community bonds.