Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s ‘Cloud’ is a strange, slow-burn tech thriller

By the usual standards of J-horror virtuoso Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Cloud is impressively understated. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t downright eerie. On the surface, its tale of an online merch reseller getting his comeuppance might not seem like fodder for psychological thrills, but Kurosawa imbues his modern tech saga with immense paranoia, and eventually, with a strangeness verging on phantasmagorical, which clashes wildly and uneasily with its withheld approach.

Yoshii (Suda Masaki) works a factory job by day. By night, he rips off local manufacturers by underpaying them for bulk goods, and sells them online at an enormous markup. It isn’t strictly illegal, except for when he sells designer bags that might actually be cheap knockoffs, but usually, his inventory is gone before he has a chance to verify the authenticity—not that he wants to. Scenes of Yoshii staring at his computer screen as each item goes from “listed” to “wanted” to “sold” have an uncanny quality, thanks to Suda’s dead-behind-the-eyes appearance. Like Cloud itself, he’s oddly captivating.

Yoshiyuki Morishita as Murota and Masaki Suda as Ryosuke Yoshii.

Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films

The character is presented as a wonderful mystery, but a quick peek behind the curtain reveals an empty husk of a person, whose only identity is that of a middleman addicted to the hustle. He knows, on some level, what he’s doing is morally bankrupt—the groveling salespeople he underpays remind him of this—but he proceeds regardless. However, his misanthropy isn’t divorced from the notion of consequence. He knows, or at least suspects, that what goes around will eventually come around. Anytime he’s alone in his Tokyo apartment, or riding public transport, Kurosawa’s framing becomes nerve-wracking, as Yoshii inspects his surroundings for people creeping up on him unexpectedly. His solution? Quitting his day job, and moving himself and his girlfriend Akiko (Furukawa Kotone) to a lonely, forested suburb, and reselling full-time from the shadows.

Ketone Furukawa as Akiko and Masaki Suda as Ryosuke Yoshii.

Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films

Cloud is the kind of movie in which things go bump in the night, revealing horror-adjacent scenes framed by mundane domesticity. Each instance of hair-raising fear is funny in retrospect—especially its numerous fake-outs—but in the moment, the threat of violent home invasions looms over the young couple, and is made utterly convincing by Suda’s restrained performance. What especially sells the illusion of terror is where Kurosawa and cinematographer Sasaki Yasuyuki place the camera during these scenes: usually right in Yoshii’s eyeline, so that even when he’s scanning empty space, and looking at nothing in particular, the presence of the lens (and our own presence as viewers) morphs the scene. His gaze is meeting someone, or something, in the ether, even if it’s just a phantom in his mind.

This encroaching paranoia is usually embodied by lights moving across space—whether from a passing car, or even the sunlight moving between clouds—and becomes all the more palpable when it does, in fact, seem like someone is unhappy with Yoshii, and throws a mechanical object through his bedroom window. From there on out, things unfold in an almost dreamlike fashion, despite Kurosawa’s visual restraint. The camera remains still and observant, but Yoshii displays a sense of energetic urgency, whether he’s trying to sell off existing merchandise as quickly as possible, or trying desperately to acquire more, as he grows more mindlessly obsessed with his task. But when it turns out he’s hurt enough people, in enough different ways, the retreat of the reseller grind and the shield of online anonymity are no longer enough to protect him, as he begins experiencing the waking, tongue-in-cheek nightmare of everyone he’s ever slighted returning to exact vigilante vengeance by way of gunfight.

Masaki Suda as Ryosuke Yoshii.

Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films

The film soon dovetails into an extended, slow-burn action climax, involving bizarre encounters with people and entities just off screen. There may as well be an entirely different movie taking place outside the frame—one much more lively and polished—while the story Kurosawa forces us to witness is filled with impotent villains on either side, so warped by the Internet and so trapped by the financial rat race that they may as well be twisted science experiments. The result is a delightfully misanthropic piece of suspense, one that remains scarily tapped into the wavelength of the modern Internet, but refuses to show its hand by sermonizing about its dangers. Instead, it embodies those possibilities with unsettling flair.