Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest dissection of human rot pushes the Japanese auteur into provocative, action-driven new places
While auteurs like Bong Joon-Ho and Takashi Miike have gained international attention with their bold, crowd-pleasing genre experiments, legendary Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has quietly made a profound impact over decades with films that defy easy categorization through their unique blend of genres. From the voyeuristic suspense of Creepy and the disorienting travelogue drama of To the Ends of the Earth to the wartime romantic espionage of Wife of a Spy and his cold-blooded, abstract return to horror in the 45-minute Chime, Kurosawa has forged his universally unsettling sense of dread into a key foundation that he can build any film upon, pulling material from all sorts of films to create something completely new.
His latest, Cloud, dives into the niche yet lucrative world of online resellers. Under the alias Ratel (also a pun on “retail”), Ryosuke (Masaki Suda) trolls Tokyo for troubled businesses, snaps up overstock or failing product, and resells them online with flashy marketing for insanely high markups. Kurosawa quickly shows how Ryosuke’s dispassionate, aggressively forward-thinking approach makes him preternaturally perfect to succeed in this industry–no matter how much scorched earth he leaves behind him along the way. However, those burned by Ryosuke’s actions have begun assembling in the dark corners of the Internet, and plan to bring their violent wishes out of virtual chatrooms and into reality itself.
In 2001, Kurosawa’s Pulse channeled the J-Horror boom into an apprehensive eye towards the early days of the Internet, wary that this connective platform may fester deepening isolation between humans. Cloud seems to suggest that Kurosawa was half-right: instead, the Internet has become a violently effective tool of late-stage capitalism, whose relentless pursuit of profit has led to the commodification of people and relationships as much as products themselves. When Ryosuke’s success allows him to quit his dry-cleaning day job, Ryosuke’s boss Takimoto (a wonderfully bemused yet menacing Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) suggests his employee isn’t thinking straight; to him, no right-minded person would pursue “some random desire to be happier than others.” Ryosuke’s mentor Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) is equally shocked at his underling’s rapid ascent, coupled with Ryosuke’s proposal to girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa)–believing Ryosuke wasn’t capable of pursuing “conventional happiness.” But in nearly every respect, all of Ryosuke’s actions are self-serving and transactional. Ryosuke’s relationship with Akiko feels ornamental, another prize to win to affirm his status. He says whatever he needs to to get struggling business owners to accept his meager cash offerings. The seeming benevolence of hiring a local boy, Sano (Daiken Okudaira) is only meant to free up Ryosuke to hoard even more cheap and useless products. There’s no rhyme or reason to whatever Ryosuke snaps up–“real or fake doesn’t matter,” he intones–he’s following pure instinct, addicted to the possibility of opportunity. The gambling nature of Ryosuke’s games are distilled to a chessboard-like marketing grid as products turn red one-by-one to mark them as sold, while Ryosuke watches with subtle yet pavlovian glee. While those who led Ryosuke to this path see him following his “passions,” this constant hustle and complete disregard for humanity is both rewarding to Ryosuke as it is rewarded by society. It’s a sense of base, impulsive happiness at the cost of everything else that makes people “human.”
It’s a bleak subject matter from the start, well in keeping with Kurosawa’s latest output like Before We Vanish or Creepy, examining societal collapse alongside a collapse of individual social behavior. But much like those films, Kurosawa infuses the terrorizing tedium of Ryosuke’s life with as much grim humor as he does gut-churning existential malaise. So much of Cloud’s laughs come from the natural absurdity of how capitalist greed becomes wholly alien to compassionate social interaction–as Masaki Suda’s Ryosuke fumbles through conversations fishing for whatever angle can get him what he wants. Even in Kurosawa’s still frames, Suda is always vibrating, searching for the next step forward in ways that are both mindless and incredibly purposeful–embodying the animalistic instinct of the honey badger that Ryosuke draws his online namesake from, or a dead-eyed shark searching the waters for blood. Arakawa’s Takimoto is a hilarious mouthpiece as well for tone-deaf corporate slogans about perseverance and working hard to one’s detriment, even as Takimoto’s own desires take on a murderous streak. It’s a fascinating continuation of Kurosawa’s studies of human contradictions, reveling in how eager we seem to place ourselves in fragile, artificial prisons of our own making. For those in the West, it’s hard not to compare Cloud to Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, which equally questioned Jake Gyllenhaal’s sociopathic crime-scene documentarian as much as the obsessive success-driven society that gave birth to a monster like him. We laugh at the absurdity of both Gyllenhaal and Suda’s relentless ambition–and recoil as their actions help deliver exactly what they want, no matter the larger cost.
More so than Kurosawa’s past genre films, though, is how eager he is to shift between disparate tones and genres over the course of Cloud’s two hours. As Ryosuke expands his potential, moving to a palatial lakeside house in a small, suspicious village, he quickly realizes how much deeper he seems to be digging his own grave. Random attacks become a regular occurrence, and his paranoia skyrockets. Throughout this section, Kurosawa brings the horror movie tension of Pulse and Seance to a story about deeply corrupt individuals, eventually building to a breaking point reminiscent of his early crime thrillers like Cure or Eyes of the Spider. The third act even sees the director move away from quiet, brooding nuance into the violent realm of The Strangers or a Sam Peckinpah shootout, delivering one of the most surprisingly action-driven set pieces of Kurosawa’s career. While such explosions of violence have been brief yet impactful–see Cure or the imagined self-immolation of Seance–it’s fascinating to see how Kurosawa chooses to tackle an extended shootout like the one that closes out Cloud. It’s not quite John Wick–yet Kurosawa frames Ryosuke’s cat-and-mouse escape from his aggressors as a methodical feeding frenzy, a brutal outlet for beasts who to this point have confined their showdowns to a wholly virtual arena.
Fittingly, Cloud also comes to an apocalyptically-tinged finale–one that suggests that our commodification of people will continue to blindly metastasize without any end but The End. It’s an ending well familiar to Kurosawa fans–yet it’s one deliciously presented as reflecting that things stay the same the more we imagine we’ve changed things.
This bitter self-reflection, coupled with such bold experimentation with action, tone, and genre, makes Cloud’s brooding, brutal tale of resellers wreaking havoc on humanity one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s best films to date, capping off a banner year for the Godfather of modern Japanese existential dread.
Cloud had its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024, and was recently announced as the Japanese Entry for the Best International Film Oscar at the Academy Awards. It is currently seeking U.S. Distribution.
