The internet is a dangerous place. That’s the starting point for Cloud, a new thriller from the other Kurosawa—Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the prolific Japanese writer-director of Cure, Pulse, and Tokyo Sonata.
In Cloud, an online reseller, Yoshii (played by Masaka Sudi), scores his goods for dirt cheap and resells them at a huge markup, unknowingly drawing resentment from the people he’s pissed off with dubious merchandise.
In a director’s statement, Kurosawa said he was inspired by the real-world rise of petty acts of violence in Japan, where online grudges metastasize into IRL attacks. He wondered “if such a phenomenon would serve as subject matter for an action film.” To say that the cloud of virtual anger Yoshii generates turns into something more tangible isn’t spoiling much, but the real fun of Cloud is how Kurosawa slowly builds up the tension, then releases it in an absurdly hilarious showdown.
At the outset, Yoshii is decidedly small-time, working a day job at a garment factory and living in a cramped apartment among the cardboard cartons of his ill-gotten goods: a medical therapy device that might be a useless metal box, handbags that may or may not be knockoffs, a collectible figurine that’s in high demand by the sort of person that covets collectible figurines.
Yoshii’s girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furokawa) lurks among the boxes too, and when a big score allows them to share a larger place outside of the city, her materialism takes full flower. Yoshii, however, remains disaffected, almost indifferent to everything except the thrill of the flip. (His online handle is Ratel, another word for honey badger, and if you remember the early-2010s video meme, you remember that honey badger don’t give a shit.) Early on, we see Yoshii staring motionless at his computer screen, watching his wares being purchased one by one. It’s the only glimmer of pleasure he ever evinces.
Trouble comes in drips, and Yoshii can’t be sure if there’s anything to worry about or if it’s just the paranoia that stems from the universal experience of spending too much time online. First, there’s a dead rat on his apartment stairs. Then, a cable mysteriously tied across two trees knocks him off his moped. And is that stranger on the bus an actual threat or just some weird guy standing too close?
Cloud takes place primarily within anonymous industrial landscapes, with a wintry, drab color palette. We hear Yoshii’s computer whirr ominously, and car alarms provide an ambient soundtrack—the silences are never truly silent. Yoshii’s newfound fortune allows him to hire an assistant, the seemingly devoted Sano (Daiken Okudaira), and the new place he shares with Akiko is much more spacious. But it’s more of a warehouse than a home, and its isolation provides a level of vulnerability Yoshii hadn’t anticipated. It doesn’t help his anxiety that Sano is poking around on his computer, either, or that Akiko has become bored to distraction. Soon, Yoshii realizes that his hustle might cost him more than he planned. But is it even a hustle—isn’t he just selling things to people who willingly buy them? Isn’t that simply capitalism, the economic and cultural model we base our lives on?
Kurosawa handles these questions as deftly as he handles the suspense, which billows and accrues until it fulminates in an extended action set piece. He’s fascinated by the ways that anonymous online interactions can progress into real-world conflict. To its credit, though, Cloud plays better as a taut, economical thriller than as a societal treatise—even if it’ll have you thinking twice about the next time you try to score something from Facebook Marketplace.
Cloud opens at Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy; Living Room Theaters, 341 SW 10th on Fri Aug 1.
