This review is based on a screening at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is such a prolific director that his latest film, Cloud, isn’t even his sole contribution to 2024. In fact, Cloud caps off what may be the filmmaker’s busiest year yet: His for-whom-the-bell-tolls horror/thriller Chime dropped in the first quarter of the year, while The Serpent’s Path, a remake of his 1998 film of the same name, made its U.S. premiere alongside Cloud at Beyond Fest. Three films in a single year—what are the odds that they all exemplify Kurosawa at his finest?
I wouldn’t suggest taking bets on Cloud being the standout Kurosawa offering of 2024. This curious action-thriller, which centers on an unscrupulous online reseller who has a violent showdown with his disgruntled buyers (played by Masaki Suda of The Boy and the Heron and the 2021 Cube remake), features most of the director’s formal hallmarks, if not his finesse. The film has long, steady stretches of creeping unease, gnarly interpersonal relationships, and plenty of destructive determination, yet these parts, once assembled, create a cacophony of grinding tones. As a thriller, Cloud is half of a fascinating, disquieting, grimly amusing satire of online chicanery. As an action movie, it’s chaotic and vague, grasping to voice a critique of our digitally warped capitalistic age. “What price profit?” Cloud asks. When Kurosawa finally smashes these two halves into one, you might be indifferent to the answer.
“Impulse and instinct. That’s how I operate,” says cool, ambitious Ryosuke Yoshii (Suda), an online flipper who has learned to respect the hustle of buying low and selling high. Put more directly, he acquires cheap goods from desperate folks and sells them at an exploitative markup. At first, Yoshii revels in his trade; his first flip—a lot of medical equipment—yields over $27,300 (4,200,000 yen) after dropping a measly 580 bucks on their former owners. As the zeros increase in his bank account, Yoshii develops a refined taste for this racket. His factory boss, Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), sees his drive as a leadership quality and offers him a higher position: “You’re resourceful and committed,” he says, to which Yoshii dismissively replies, “I’m just unassertive. It only looks like I’m committed.”
In truth, Yoshii is committed, only to the dopamine rush of a proper sale. In one scene, we can practically feel his heart rate quicken as he discovers his latest flip, so intently does he feel the risk of profit. What will it be this time: fortune or famine? And, when Yoshii misses the opportunity to land his newest lot, that high naturally takes a nose-dive, triggering a cascade of rash decisions and unfortunate returns during Cloud‘s compelling first half.
During this stretch, Yoshii’s cash flow balloons, prompting him to abandon his apartment and steady factory gig to shack up in a secluded warehouse outside Tokyo, making his shady enterprise more conspicuous to local police (a plotline that never develops) and a source of boredom for his spendthrift girlfriend, Aikiko (Kotone Furukawa, boosting a woefully underwritten role). However, this frees up Yoshii to hire resourceful Sano (Daiken Okudaira), who both sees and appreciates Yoshii’s grift for reasons that only kind of take shape well after Kurosawa has made his big twists and the film has effectively swapped out its darkly compelling satire for a more conventional revenge movie. By then, Aikikio and Sano have become little more than necessary cogs in the Cloud mechanism. They don’t exist in this film; they function.
For a methodical think-piece on capitalism’s cruel grip on our souls, the basic thrust of Kurosawa’s revenge twist is alarmingly boilerplate: Yoshii has stepped on a host of other people to make money, and now they want to pay him back with interest. More, his change in venue leaves him vulnerable to doxxing courtesy of his comically disgruntled victims who have congregated on the dark web, and have tracked him down with ease. Still, everything leading to this showdown, before the film shifts into a goofball actioner with some admittedly killer one-liners (“Too late to live now” and “Hell’s waitin’ for ya” being my favorites), showcases Kurosawa’s lasting ability to really cook. He establishes a widening chasm between ambition and human decency that Yoshii is only too willing to throw himself into, and, for a time, I was willing to jump in with him.
That’s what makes Cloud so frustrating. As a dark rumination on internet grifter culture, its first half provokes solid ideas that support the director’s premise of how we go mad thanks to our online distance, which is why it’s a shame that Kurosawa doesn’t wholly commit to the mood that supports his conceit. Still, palpable danger looms for a good stretch, sometimes in the form of overt threats—there’s a dead rat left outside Yoshii’s home—other times as narrowly-evaded promises, like a taut wire pulled across his scooter’s path home. Shadows lurk in the periphery, and should you catch sight of them before Yoshii does, Cloud might steal a breath from you. But this energy doesn’t last. The sum of Kurosawa’s mounting dread feels like little more than minutes passing by for the inevitable cop-out, not for Yoshii but for us, soaring overhead like so many … well, you know.
Jarrod Jones is a freelance critic based in Chicago, with bylines at The A.V. Club, IGN, Polygon, and any place that will take him, really. For more of his mindless thoughts on genre trash, cartoons, and comic books, follow him on Twitter (@jarrodjones_) or check out his blog, DoomRocket.
