December 06 2025, 20:50
Cloud
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Release year: 2024
Ryōsuke Yoshii buys and sells things on the internet. He has a knack for sensing what’s valuable to the market, then buying cheap and coldly selling for enormous profits. He escapes Tokyo with girlfriend Akiko to find more space for his wares, cutting off his boss and other business associates to do it, but his insensitivity makes him enemies, and a group of them track him down for revenge.
The first half of the film shows Yoshii’s life as an online reseller, buying and selling on an auction website, collecting boxes of anonymous products, staring at a computer screen like he’s betting at machines in a casino. He’s always calculating the options to make money. It’s like in the film Wall Street, where the traders make money by destroying businesses and livelihoods. Yoshii doesn’t care if his goods are real or fake, safe or harmful, as long as they are sold quickly. He seems completely disassociated from the feelings of the people around him.
This unempathic, blank affect, along with a camera that, as in Kurosawa’s earlier films, Pulse and Cure, makes the empty spaces behind characters feel threatening, creates a deep sense of dread. Yushii’s ex-boss represents the straight road of business, and at the start of the film wants to take Yoshii under his wing, but in the film’s second half he shows up with a shotgun and a gang in tow. Things take a turn away from horror and more into a mixture of thriller and black comedy. This didn’t work as well for me.
Yoshii’s new assistant, Sano, emerges as a real-world gangland counterpoint to the motley group of kidnappers. Sano’s easy violence becomes a path for Yoshii to follow and they gradually pick off the gang in an abandoned warehouse. It’s like an awkward, slow video game. The comparison between online and real-world violence is clear, and by the end Yoshii realises his immoral actions have set him on the path to hell.
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