‘Cloud’ Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Delivers a Brilliant Action Movie as Only He Would Think to Make One
An action film as only “Cure” and “Pulse” director Kiyoshi Kurosawa would think to make one, “Cloud” leverages the social disaffection at the heart of his analog horror masterpieces into a sterile — but eventually bullet-filled — morality tale about the dehumanizing nature of digital communication. The first hour is a slow accumulation of the petty crimes (and other various insults) that the internet allows people to commit against one another from a distance, and with the benefit of anonymity. The second hour observes what happens when those petty crimes reach a critical mass, and the animus that’s been welling up on social media spills into the real world with the deadly force of a double-barreled shotgun.
If Kurosawa’s work has long displayed a morbid fascination with the relationship between diffuse psychic distress and localized physical violence, “Cloud” updates the filmmaker’s signature focus for a modern world that’s enmeshed in an infinite (but invisible) network of small cruelties and bitter grievances — a network so ubiquitous that even the better angels of our nature might drive us straight into hell. Almost too mundane to care about until it becomes impossible to stop watching for much the same reason, this riveting and highly unusual shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, only to discover that psychological terror isn’t quite as abstract as it used to be.
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At its most basic level, “Cloud” is about a quasi-sociopathic internet reseller who hoards all manner of crap — medical devices, handbags, collectible dolls — so that he can artificially inflate the prices of these goods and sell them to desperate strangers on the internet for profit. His name is Yoshii Ryosuke (Masaki Suda, who recently voiced the titular bird in “The Boy and the Heron”), he lives in a cramped apartment that’s full of large boxes, and he’s basically what it would look like if a shady Instagram ad came to life. Some of the stuff he sells is real, some of the stuff he sells is fake, and none of it matters to him whatsoever (the “Fiber Embalm” discs he sells feel like an expression of his indifference). Yoshii doesn’t even seem particularly concerned about the money. For him, the balance of his checking account is like the score of a video game, and watching his computer monitor as suckers buy his items in real-time is his only source of joy.
Yoshii has a menial factory job that keeps him tethered to polite society, but he’s so bored of it that he decides to quit the minute he’s faced with the threat of a promotion (Yoshii tells his overeager boss that he’s unassertive and only looks enterprising). He has a girlfriend named Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), but she mostly just ogles Yoshii’s stuff while flitting through the background; when Yoshii is approached with a business proposition by an old friend from his college days (Masataka Kubota as Muraoka), our dubious hero winds up apologizing to his pal for daring to find “conventional happiness,” as if being in a relationship is a betrayal of the boys’ unspoken commitment to fucking people over from afar.
Not to worry, Muraoka: There’s little doubt as to where Yoshii’s heart lies. The lake house he rents on the outskirts of a rural Japanese town isn’t the romantic getaway that Akiko might assume, but rather the headquarters of Yoshii’s new full-time reselling business. Of course, the real value of the rental is as a hideout. The legion of people who Yoshii has managed to piss off are on the brink of doxxing him (he finds a dead rat on his doorstep one morning, and scooters into a trip-wire the following night), and he needs a place where he can lay low while his new assistant (Daiken Okudaira as the angel-faced Sano) takes care of the dirty work. But no one who lives on the internet is all that hard to find.
The walls are definitely closing in on Yoshii during the first half of this movie, but “Cloud” is much less interested in manufacturing empty suspense than it is in staring at the apathy that’s responsible for — and generated by — his protagonist’s situation. The clinical numbness of Kurosawa’s direction undercuts the genre-made tension of his story to a degree that forces us to stop judging Yoshii in favor of focusing on his banality. He’s a rather basic guy at the end of the day, and Suda’s quizzical performance feasts on the sinister averageness of today’s online pests, as well as the lack of emotional responsibility they feel towards their targets. His Yoshii is smart enough to rig the internet into a trap, but not smart enough to avoid getting caught in it himself, which makes him both a clear villain and an all too relatable fool.
What it doesn’t do is make us, his girlfriend, or anyone else care about his feelings, as “Cloud” — the title of which refers to both the nebulous data hub, and also the throngs of angry strangers who billow around Yoshii as the film goes on — is shaped by the same discommunication that informs its characters. This is a story that takes place in a country and a world in which what people mean to each other is fraying apart at the seams, and it’s wildly satisfying to discover what that means in the context of Kurosawa’s characters.
To say anything more specific about that would risk spoiling the fun, but there’s a unique thrill to watching “Cloud” shift from a sedate internet crime saga and into a frenetic manhunt (alternately funny and frightening), as the digital search for Yoshii is distilled into the cavernous guts of an abandoned factory. Kurosawa wholly embraces the unseriousness of Yoshii’s enemies without ever diminishing the seriousness of what they represent, and while some of them prove more intriguing than others, all of them contribute to a brilliant setpiece in which the sight of people shooting at anything that moves becomes a perfect metaphor for online interaction. Kurosawa may not be asked to direct a “John Wick” movie anytime soon, but his action choreography is hyper-lucid in its crudeness, the sociopathy he diagrams is fantastically kinetic in its own respect, and Yoshii’s ultimate fate when the dust settles is rewarding in a way that you will never see coming. Then again, I suppose that such mutual insanity could only ever lead to one place, and few recent films have painted a more damning portrait of how we’re all going there together.
Grade: B+
“Cloud” premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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