Cloud follows Ryosuke Yoshii, a factory worker who moonlights as a grey-market online reseller exploiting small business owners.Films We Like/Supplied
Cloud
Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa and Daiken Okudaira
Classification N/A; 124 minutes
Opens in select theatres, including the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, July 18
Critic’s Pick
Buy low, sell high might be the mantra of Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a Tokyo factory worker whose off hours are spent in the grey-market world of online resale, and whose struggles are the focus of the excellent new thriller Cloud. But the economic maxim might also apply to Cloud’s own writer-director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
If you bought stock in the filmmaker back during his early, perhaps more disreputable days working in Japan’s pink-film and V-Cinema genres (essentially, direct-to-video erotic thrillers and yakuza flicks), then you’d be a rich cinephile today, given that Kurosawa is now widely regarded as his country’s greatest, and slipperiest, working auteur.
After spending the past few years experimenting with period drama (2020’s Wife of a Spy) and French-language cinema (last year’s remake of Serpent’s Path), Kurosawa inches back toward the knotted-stomach dread of his horror classics Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) with Cloud, albeit accented this time with a healthily morbid sense of humour. And, perhaps more surprising, a serious affinity for action movie shoot-outs.
The title “Cloud” most likely refers to the digital storage infrastructure that Yoshii relies upon for his moonlighting gig, a sly bit of retail rigging that involves exploiting small business owners by buying up their wares (sometimes legitimate, sometimes counterfeit) in bulk, then reselling them on an eBay-like website for a significant markup.
But the film’s title might as well refer to the increasingly ominous environment which surrounds Yoshii. Once he quits his 9-to-5 job and moves his expanding resale operation out of Tokyo and into the countryside – his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) follows dutifully – the shades of Yoshii’s life begin to darken significantly.
The film grows dark when Yoshii quits his day job and moves to the countryside with his wife to accommodate his growing resale business.Films We Like/Supplied
At first, it is difficult to pinpoint what changes and when. Is the turning point when Yoshii hires a suspiciously enthusiastic assistant named Sano (Daiken Okudaira)? Or perhaps when Yoshii has an unfriendly run-in with a local police officer after a seemingly random act of vandalism on his rural property? Kurosawa dials the dread up slowly and steadily, until Yoshii finds himself the target of the world’s most disgruntled customers.
If Kurosawa is asking his audience to empathize with Yoshii, he’s got a funny way of doing it. Motivated only by the amount of yen in his bank account, the character is a difficult one to root for. But then again, his aggrieved customers are driven by their own sordid, selfish desires – the thugs have spent unknown hours successfully “doxing” Yoshii’s real identity, but wear masks to clumsily protect their own.
By the film’s haunting finale – a gut-punch moment of reckoning that follows nearly half an hour of entertainingly amateurish gunplay – Kurosawa’s sentiments on the current state of e-commerce are clear. Whether emptor or venditor, capitalism is full of caveats.
