If Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 psychological horror Pulse was about how the internet was becoming a feeble stand-in for real communication, his latest film, Cloud, is about how it’s made us numb. That numbness is reflected in its detached performances and how his camera drifts through echoing, coldly lit spaces, observing its characters chasing sensations. The protagonist, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), does it through selling, his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) does it through buying, while other characters chase feeling through violence.
The film continually peels back these layers. It opens with its main character ripping off suppliers of medical machines who are overburdened with stock: he buys a clutch of them for 90,000 yen, and sells them on for 200,000 yen each. Kurosawa films the sequence with a claustrophobic framing — Yoshii’s relatively spacious apartment becoming cramped and boxed-in as selling becomes the focus, everything around it now unimportant. The apartment has no decoration, no indication of an identity beyond Yoshii’s work. He watches dispassionately as items are snapped up online; once they sell out, the title of the film appears in view — none of the fire or practice of salesmanship, just the cold light of the digital screen.
Cloud is a compellingly tricky film to pin down, both stylistically and thematically.
As Yoshii moves out of Tokyo into the countryside to focus on his shady business full-time, the film continues along this path, ramping up the isolation and paranoia along the way. Scenes are quiet until they’re suddenly not. The eerie soundtrack dips in and out. The acting is performed with an intentional lack of passion. Even the most extreme moments unfold with an increasingly unsettling reserve.
After Yoshii scams a few too many people, Cloud takes a turn from paranoid social drama into something more violent and absurd. His online enemies track him down in real life and look to torture and kill him. They, too, are detached and isolated oddballs in search of purpose. One even admits that there’s nothing in his life except looking forward to killing the person who made a fool of him. The action that spirals out of this confrontation is both surprising and fascinatingly messy, a collision of various people who are both psychopathic and also out of their depth.
So, while there are familiar 21st century terrors like the practice of ‘doxxing’, these are thematic stops on the way to something larger and less easy to define. Cloud is a compellingly tricky film to pin down, both stylistically and thematically. Is it a social drama about the internet age? Not entirely. A home-invasion thriller? For a little bit. An action film? Almost. In all of these guises, Kurosawa’s film searches, perhaps in vain, for where this violence within us comes from, and finds layers of irrationality and jealousy and materialism, this ugliness unravelled with a dark sense of humour (and eventually, gunfire).