Cloud ★★★½

No one comes out clean in our post-capitalist world. You’re either exploited, or you’re an exploiter. At least that’s what it looks like in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, which functions as an ice-cold neo-noir thriller and a bleak-as-hell diagnosis of our socio-economic situation in the Web 2.0 era.

Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is the latest victim of hustle culture. When we meet him, he’s got a job at a clothing factory with a standing offer to move up the ladder into management. But let’s face it, a stable job with room to grow? That’s so twentieth century. Who’d want to grind away as a cog in the factory machine when you can make quick and easy money as a reseller on the internet? When Yoshii buys a truckload of dubious medical gadgets and sells them all within a matter of seconds for a ridiculous profit, you can see it in his eyes: he’s gone dark, and there’s no going back.

Like a lot of the best moments in Cloud, Yoshii’s transformation happens in an expertly composed, wordless scene that unfolds without music and luxuriates in the kind of unsettling mood that Kurosawa has perfected over the past four decades of making movies. Not all of his movies have been creepy, but many – including 2016’s Creepy – have proved him to be a master of dreadful suspense that often involves peeking into the shadows of society to reveal some seriously sinister shit going on.

Cloud isn’t a horror movie but it feels like one because, from that eerie moment when Yoshii sells his first pile of junk, there’s a sustained mood of waiting for something horrible to happen. In that transaction, we’ve basically watched a young man make a deal with the devil – he’s sold a bit of his soul in that online auction – and it’s only a matter of time before something evil comes to collect. As it turns out, we don’t have to wait long before bad things start to happen; like a dead rat showing up on his doorstep, or a boobytrap that sends him flying off his scooter. But like any good noir movie, our protagonist remains too committed to his easy money scheme. Rather than wisely cutting his losses and backing out, he only digs himself further into the hole.

Kurosawa has fun twisting the conventions of the noir genre in Cloud. Yoshii’s girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) is a passive-aggressive femme fatale. She doesn’t lure him into any traps, but she does long for the “good life” and has no ethical concerns about how she gets there. Both Akiko and his friend Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) are soul-corroding enablers. They encourage and buffer Yoshii in an ethical dark zone where he never has to question the moral implications of making money by anonymously selling garbage to hapless people online.

But it’s only a matter of time before those implications catch up with our protagonist, and when they do the movie ramps up from suspenseful noir to violent thriller without missing a step. One could say that Cloud gets a little absurd in the later section, when everyone who’s ever been wronged by Yoshii shows up en masse to eke out their revenge in a very cinematic and darkly comical fashion. In less experienced hands, this shift could break a movie, but Kurosawa has so soundly built his foundation that Cloud soars into grand excess with a confidence that lets you know there was no other way this could end.

This is what makes Cloud particularly thrilling. The further Yoshii falls into his hole, the further the film glides into a cinematic world that has little to do with realism. By the end, it’s a movie-movie, operating on film logic and riding off into a completely fabricated sunset. But that doesn’t mean it’s veering off into escapism. Quite the opposite. Kurosawa is driving home his bleak point about the disappearance of morals when it comes to making money in a post-capitalist, extremely online society, and rather than completely bumming you out, he’s committed to making something that’s both entertaining and sociologically relevant – both hyperviolent and morally sound. When guns start to go off in Cloud, they’re not cool, they’re loud and scary.  

It’s a zone that I really appreciate, and one that doesn’t come along very often, where you get your genre kicks while still being guided by a thoughtful filmmaker with a smart, subversive edge – someone who wants the violence to hit you in a different way. Kurosawa is in the top tier of directors when it comes to delivering suspenseful thrills, but he also knows that those thrills can be even more impactful when they’re coming from the perspective of a lead character who’s as hapless, unprepared, and yet utterly complicit as Yoshii. It’s that balance, of scraping the bottom of Yoshii’s soul while still reveling in cinematic whiz-bangery, that makes Cloud a must-see movie.