Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira
I could never become a career criminal because I've made a point of
avoiding as much stress in my life as possible. A regular job is
stressful enough without all the paranoia that comes from earning a
living outside the law. Having to answer an email from your boss at 8pm
is nothing compared to having to sleep with a gun under your pillow or
check under your car before you turn your engine on.
Few movies have focussed on the stress of criminality to the degree
of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud. Kurosawa's protagonist isn't even a full-on mobster, but rather
someone working on the fringes of legality, breaking more ethical codes
than actual laws.
Sick of slaving away in his factory job, Yoshii (Masaki Suda) has entered the murky world of online reselling. Yoshii takes
advantage of traditional brick and mortar business experiencing trouble,
buying their stock (which sometimes includes counterfeit goods) at such
a low price it's tantamount to theft before selling the goods online at
a high mark-up. The shoddy nature of many of Yoshii's goods, which he
sells under the pseudonym "Ratel", has drawn the ire of many of his
customers, who have begun to band together online in an attempt to dox
him. This leads Yoshii to leave Tokyo for a secluded house in the
countryside outside the city, where he moves in with his
girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) and hires a young local,
Sano (Daiken Okudaira), to be his assistant, all after quitting
his factory job.
Yoshii soon finds his troubles have followed him, as a car part is
thrown through his window in the middle of the night and the local
police threaten to search his home, having heard rumours of his dealing
in counterfeit goods. As Yoshii becomes more paranoid, he also grows
increasingly ruthless, travelling to Tokyo to pummel the man who sold
him dodgy handbags. This puts a dent in his relationship with Akiko, who
grows tired of Yoshii's single-minded focus on his business.
Cloud is very much a movie of two halves. Its first hour is a
relatively grounded character study of a young man consumed by the grift
economy. We watch as Yoshii becomes less human as each new deal eats
away at his soul, and Suda portrays Yoshii's transformation impeccably.
It's in the second half that we're reminded that we're watching a movie
from the director of such Japanese horror classics as Cure and Pulse. The latter saw ghosts emerge from the internet into the real world,
and Cloud follows a similar path, except it's very real flesh and blood
people who go from online anonymity to real world threats. With Yoshii's
address exposed, a posse made up of business owners and customers he has
ripped off, along with those he's merely socially slighted, including
his deranged former factory boss (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), arrive
armed to the teeth in search of revenge.
The shift in tone from crime drama to action movie may prove too
jarring for some viewers, but if you can swallow what Kurosawa is
offering you're in for a treat. Cloud takes on an absurdist quality as the violence escalates, and at
one point, as Yoshii and his newfound saviour Sano dodge gunfire by
zigzagging, Kurosawa seems to explicitly reference Peter Falk and Alan
Arkin in the 1979 action comedy The In-Laws. In its wild shift, Cloud is surprisingly similar to British filmmaker Gerard Johnson's
recent thriller Odyssey. Both films draw us in with an unscrupulous protagonist, only to drop
us into a hail of gunfire and bloodshed for a more genre-influenced
final act, and both films posit capitalist ventures as a Faustian
bargain in which profit can't be made without betraying a part of your
soul.
While the second half of Kurosawa's film is an unexpected rollercoaster
ride of violence, it's the tension of the first half that works best. As
it becomes clear that Yoshii's life may be in danger, our allegiance
begins to shift as we sympathise with his plight. Kurosawa preys on our
paranoia that the faceless weirdos who anonymously spout bile all day
long on the internet might someday materialise in our offline reality.
Ever since Elon Musk made Twitter a free-for-all in the name of
protecting free speech, we've seen the platform taken over by
hate-filled lunatics. We can try to comfort ourselves by dismissing such
people as a few sad cases living in their parents' basements, but the
sheer numbers suggest that they occupy all walks of life, and that,
terrifyingly, they walk among us. Kurosawa's thriller is a disturbing
contemplation of what might happen when an online mob breaks free of the
cloud and assembles to enact their agenda in the real world.
Cloud is in UK/ROI cinemas
from April 25th.
