Cloud: an online hustle turns deadly in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s violent, freewheeling thriller

• Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film Festival

Buying stuff online has been a mundane convenience for years, but leave it to Kurosawa Kiyoshi to tap into torrents of bad mojo coursing through the world of internet resale. In the genre-creeping Cloud, the fast-and-loose tactics of one such reseller causes others to retaliate, veering a dogged character study into the wilds of vigilantism, with chilling implications about ethics and capitalism. 

Kurosawa doesn’t exactly start us off in a safe zone, either, introducing wheeler dealer Yoshii Ryôsuke (Suda Masaki) as he badgers an older couple into selling an inventory of medical devices at a cut price, which he later hawks online. Otherwise resigned to his factory day job, Ryôsuke gets goaded by a friend (Kubota Masataka) into pursuing something bigger. Much of the movie’s first half is given over to Ryôsuke’s pursuit of products to buy and re-sell; his goods display on his computer as rows of icons that each change colour with a winning bid. Eventually relocating to suburban outskirts, he works out of an industrial looking silver-toned condo, accompanied by his increasingly bored and directionless girlfriend, Akiko (Furukawa Kotone). 

Kurosawa has always been able to make the most ordinary room hum with disquiet or latent violence. Ryôsuke’s home feels lifeless even with the addition of an assistant, Sano (Okudaira Daiken), bringing a dash of spry next-gen energy. But Sano soon uncovers an army of enraged customers online who rail against Ryôsuke (or rather ‘Ratel,’ his merchant moniker) and vow revenge. Ryôsuke fires Sano for snooping, but when another reseller is badly beaten by a customer over Ryôsuke’s faulty product, the morose spiralling drama of his internet hustle ratchets into the horrors of home invasion and armed pursuit. 

Kurosawa’s work regularly features characters impelled by mysteriously unleashed forces – systems that take furious hold, whether supernatural or otherwise irrational – but just as unsettling is how social contagion comes into play. We’ve previously met some of the motley crew who appear on Ryôsuke’s doorstep one day to deliver payback – one is his formerly avuncular manager at the factory – but banding together seems to have peeled away their inhibitions. As the armed intruders chase Ryôsuke through his house and later a factory, it’s as if ordinary life has been replaced by a prolonged chase sequence (“You’re about to enter a world of pain!” somebody actually says). Ryôsuke, now the prey, must switch gears from unscrupulous e-commerce to evading gun shots.  

But the onslaught is not presented as a laudable comeuppance; instead, there’s a freewheeling menace which could recall a Purge movie. We’re told at least one of the attackers has participated in group vengeance like this before, boasting that there’s no leader and “we do what we want.” But Ryôsuke also has a formidable pro at his back: fresh-faced Sano, apparently a yakuza alum, back to help his boss through some ambiguous code of justice. That of course injects yet another kind of violence into the film, that of the trained killer (and Kurosawa, never one to shy from pure madness, also gives one of the assailants a surprise berserk backstory). This action plays out unpredictably, thanks to the sloppiness and lack of nerve on the part of the amateur hit-men, one of whom cravenly covers his face for fear of repercussions.  

For all the genre flourishes, Kurosawa is illustrating how the internet can facilitate the radicalisation of the worst of human behaviour and help people connect and manifest it in the world at large. But something’s also rotten here in the sometimes unsavoury aspects of buying and selling that we take for granted; the horror lies not in some undefined spectral force, but perhaps the numbing mechanisms of capitalism and commodification. Sano’s girlfriend is bluntly in thrall to these forces, perhaps too bluntly, seemingly defined by and hollowed out by her wants. But Sano too has definitely lost his way, obsessed with his merchandise and chasing a sale even when his life is in danger –behaviour that’s organically put across by Suda (who voiced the grey heron trickster of 2023’s The Boy and the Heron). 

Kurosawa’s steady control of mood and indefatigable narrative – if this becomes an action film, it’s not geared to our titillation – prevent any of this from becoming didactic. But a surprising metaphysical moment at the end that has an almost Faustian flair leaves little question of Kurosawa’s view of the venality and loss of life we’ve witnessed. The director’s work remains too captivating and faithful to the mysteries of human nature to tag the film simply as anti-capitalist, but when it comes to malaise in internet-turbocharged liberal economies, Kurosawa’s film suggests the call is coming from within the house.