Review by Eric Hillis
Cloud (2025)
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.
Charisma (1999)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1990 oddity Charisma ostensibly belongs to a sub-genre that might be considered botanical horror. Many horror movies have featured antagonists from the plant world, The Day of the Triffids being the most obvious. Trees have long been a favourite of horror filmmakers, terrorising characters in everything from Poltergeist to The Guardian. And who can forget Tabanga, the anthropomorphised killer tree from the 1957 b-movie From Hell it Came?
The tree at the centre of Kurosawa's film goes by the name of "Charisma", and it exerts such a beguiling influence over the film's many characters. Kōji Yakusho, who recently garnered much acclaim as the star of Wim Wenders' Perfect Days, plays Yabuike, a police negotiator who leaves his job and family and heads into the woods outside Tokyo after causing the deaths of a criminal and his MP hostage.
Yabuike had hoped he could save both men, but his plan backfired tragically. In the woods he is confronted with a similar dilemma in the shape of Charisma. The tree is unique and thus valued, but its roots are spreading a toxin that is killing the forest around it. Yabuike finds himself in a three-way tug of war between three groups with different intentions towards the tree. Former sanitarium inmate Kiriyama (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) is determined to protect the tree. Botanist Mitsuko (Jun Fubuki) plans to poison Charisma to save the forest. A group of mercenaries wish to remove the tree and sell it to a collector.
Kurosawa's obtuse approach allows the viewer room to overlay their own metaphors. The debate over whether to save one special tree or an unremarkable forest can be read as representing the argument between individualism and collectivism. Should the strong be allowed to survive, even if its does so by preying on the weak? It also raises the question of human intervention in the affairs of the natural world. Should we butt out and let nature take its course, as cruel as nature can sometimes be, or do we intervene and take a side? It's the classic old question of whether you would shoot a lion if you came upon it attacking a gazelle?
You could imagine this central idea fuelling a classic episode of Star Trek, with Captain Kirk coming across rival races at war over a special tree on their planet. It would no doubt be more entertaining than Charisma, which for all the food for thought it provides, is something of a slog. Its horror elements only really come to the surface in its final act and feel rushed from there on. Up to that point the film belabours its central metaphor to such a degree that you'll be mouthing the words "I get it!" at the screen.
There are hints of what was to come from Kurosawa in subsequent films. Some of the shots here are eerily striking, though a late explosion is as awful a use of CG as you'll find in a Sharknado sequel. Particularly unnerving are the scenes set in cars, with the reflections of trees on the windscreen seeming to move at half speed. An apocalyptic ending would later be reworked by the director for 2025's Cloud to much greater effect.
Cloud/Charisma is on UK bluray from January 26th.