The Crazy Thriller Cloud Captures the Casual Cruelty of Capitalism

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s disquieting new thriller, Cloud, opens in medias res, the way classical epics used to. But this time we’re not watching a heroic soldier in the midst of battle, or a vengeful prince contemplating a king’s murder. Instead, Kurosawa throws us into the middle of a minor sales negotiation with very little context: Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is trying to convince a manufacturer of a somewhat mysterious “therapy device” to sell him all his items at a heavy discount. Yoshii cuts a hurried, incurious, insensitive figure; he cares not for the man’s overhead, his manufacturing costs, nor does he show any interest in the device itself or what it does. Once he makes the purchase, Yoshii goes home, adds some flashy sales language, advertises his supposed discount, then sells everything at a substantial markup. He tensely watches his computer screen as each item is claimed. Again, we still have no real idea what these devices are or what they do. We don’t even know how Yoshii feels about all this: Once all the items are gone, he gives a brief sigh — of relief, of satisfaction? — but the anxious look on his face doesn’t go away.

Maybe Yoshii is the modern equivalent of a gunslinger or a soldier of fortune, only he’s a creature of the digital age so mostly what he does is buy and sell useless crap on the internet. Medical devices, novelty figurines, games — it doesn’t matter. His apartment is filled with nondescript postal boxes all neatly arranged, and he remarks that he needs more space. At one point, he sits at his computer, ready to click “buy” on 20 copies of a video game that’s selling fast. He’s distracted for a moment by the affectionate attentions of his beautiful girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), but when he turns back to his computer, the games have already sold out. Tragedy! Even then, however, Yoshii shows little reaction. The face he offers the world — be it to his sellers, his buyers, his colleagues, or Akiko — is an enigma. It’s the face of a man for whom things have ceased to hold any meaning or value, save for the urgency to survive.

Kurosawa has been here before, mining suspense from the cold surfaces of postmodern life. (His J-horror films from the late 1990s and early 2000s, like Cure, Charisma, and Pulse, place high in the contemporary genre canon.) But unlike the average thriller, his movies draw suspense less from incident and surprise and more from emotional dislocation. Yoshii is so fixated on buying and selling that he seems hollowed out. His anxious glances at his bank account suggest a man who barely keeps himself above water. He’s also paranoid, sensing ominous signs all around, perhaps because all he’s really doing is swindling others and he worries the ruse will eventually catch up to him. Yoshii is not some lone, unique figure of contemplation; he represents all of us, nervously trying to stay on the hamster wheel of modern capitalism with one eye over our shoulder. A lot of his buyers, we learn, appear to be other resellers.

That’s when the film takes a sharp left turn, as Kurosawa’s work often does. A somber, tense tale suddenly becomes something crazier, and the director begins indulging his more surreal side. Cloud seems to go from thriller to something closer to action — I won’t say how, exactly — but Kurosawa depicts violence with such a comical edge that he drains it of cruelty and menace. The savagery on display should be terrifying, but in a world where humans are so divorced from their actions, everything feels plastic, random, pointless.

This will surely lose some viewers, even though it’s often the charm of Kurosawa’s work. He builds tension masterfully and then undercuts it with a playful approach to plotting and action, which can feel like a betrayal. In truth, it’s all the same thing. Kurosawa films psychological torment with real gravity, and he films physical cruelty with humorous detachment. The absurdity of his vision matches our topsy-turvy reality.