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Wall Street Journal
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Cloud' Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Saga of Resale and Revenge
At the beginning of this century, in the era of AOL and the dot-com bubble, the Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa directed 'Pulse,' an early, eerie entry in the annals of internet-minded cinema. It was a ghost story in which the virtual world existed as a sort of porous spiritual dimension for lost souls, and it saw in the internet a false promise of connection that, anticipating the alienating effects of social media, proved prescient. Now, more than two decades later, Mr. Kurosawa has made a film for today's web-weary age with the thriller 'Cloud.' The protagonist is Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who works at a factory while pursuing wealth on the side as an online reseller. We meet him inspecting a load of 'therapy devices,' potential stock for his web store, and giving the owner a lowball offer that is resignedly accepted. He loads them into his van, heads home, takes pictures of a device in his makeshift product-photography studio, and posts them for sale—more than two dozen at 200,000 yen (or about $1,300) each. They sell out in a matter of minutes. But it's the way he watches this that's telling: from a safe distance, sitting across the room from his monitor, not so much a computer user as an awed spectator, wary of something lashing out from the world within the screen.
New York Times
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Cloud' Review: Buyer's Remorse
Just as Yoshii (Masaki Suda), sitting on the bus with his girlfriend, is beginning to dream about a better future early on in 'Cloud,' the camera gradually inches over, and the outline of a dark figure suddenly hovers over him. Things go deathly quiet and Yoshii turns, but the figure has dashed off the bus. It's the kind of breathtaking moment you'd expect from the writer and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa whose breakout masterpiece, 'Cure' (1997), showcased his virtuosic control of tension and atmosphere. That consummate formal ability has one ready to follow the eclectic Japanese auteur wherever this taut suspense might take us, even if, in this latest work, it might end up in some disjointed directions. Here, Kurosawa's story of what might initially appear to be sinister morphs boldly and almost irreverently into a tale of slapstick vengeance that carries with it whiffs of Michael Haneke's 'Funny Games' and Quentin Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs.' Underneath all that is perhaps something sinister still, though not from an expected place. As an online reseller who poaches just about any product he can find to sell at a higher price, Yoshii has recently had a windfall, selling a batch of medical devices. He quits his factory day job and moves to a house in the woods with his girlfriend, hoping to expand his business. Yet, eerie instances have him looking over his shoulder, and his dubious reselling practices begin to attract enemies. The gears switch hard in the film's second half, as Yoshii's karmic retribution comes knocking. But the gunslinging that ensues is not slick nor even particularly gruesome. This is the story of desperate men, pummeled by failure and itching for violent catharsis; although mostly what they get is clumsy death. That incongruence, in the movie's eyes, embodies the distinction and friction between the digital world and the real one. Online, everyone represents either cash to be made (at seemingly every turn of real and present danger, Yoshii is still just thinking of his rinky-dink hustle) or a scapegoat for one's anger. But in the physical world, those visions of revenge play out differently. Often, at decisive moments, these characters take on the persona of a villain, shouting out their machinations like they would on an online forum, only for reality to bluntly knock them over the head. It's a surprisingly funny film in that way, but also disturbing. For all of his genre-bending on display, Kurosawa is interested in something more real and more dark about humanity's capacity for greed and bitterness, and the quiet ways that the internet can further mutate those diseases in us. But that subtext gets muddled in the director's primary desire to construct playful surprises, even if some of which, particularly by the end, can be wonderfully, terrifyingly strange. Ultimately, 'Cloud' is constructing a highway to hell for Yoshii in which the demons are not phantom, but us. CloudNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters.
Globe and Mail
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Dark and stormy Japanese thriller Cloud is an excellent exploration of a market driven by greed
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. 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.
