Online greed meets offline mayhem in a moody Japanese thriller
By James Verneire/Boston Movie News
In the opening scenes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new thriller “Cloud,” wheeler-dealer protagonist Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda, “Assassination Classroom: Gradation”) buys some “therapy machines” from a hard-pressed dealer forced by circumstance to sell them at a significant loss. It’s an ideal situation for Yoshii, who makes his living “reselling” items online for higher prices than he paid for them, sometimes much higher. But it’s a terrible one for the seller, who is desperate for cash and sells his property at a great loss. It’s a business full of sharks driven by voracious hunger. But suddenly, someone, obviously a victim of Yoshii’s greed, doxxes him online, and a handful of lunatics decide to seek vengeance.
At the same time, Yoshii has been living with his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), who quits her job and to whom he has more or less proposed. Yoshii has also quit his menial “day” job, making clothing in a factory. After making, if you forgive the expression, a killing, Yoshii finds that someone has deliberately strung a wire across a road on which he drives on his scooter. He narrowly avoids serious injury. A dead rat is also left on his doorstep. Soon, Yoshii and Akiko move to a rural area outside Tokyo, where Yoshii rents a space beside a lake that is both a residence and a warehouse. After moving in, Yoshii finds himself with a new, capable assistant named Sano (Daiken Okudaira), who is both a good worker and a mirror image of his wispy-bearded, baby-faced boss. Is he a doppelganger? In an open space, we see cartons labeled “Pegasus” and “Panasonic.” Yoshii is selling.
This portrait of high-tech malaise is familiar territory for Kurosawa, who cut his teeth making “pink films,” direct-to-video “V-Cinema,” yakuza films, and, then, with more success, horror, including titles such as “Cure” (1997) and “Pulse” (2001). In the latter, a “techno-horror film” in the manner of the global hit “Ringu” (1998), ghosts invade the living world through the internet.
There are no supernatural events in “Cloud.” The violence in the film is psychological and physical. Yoshii is threatened with being roasted alive on-camera and streamed around the world. He goes to the police only to be threatened with a prison sentence by a detective. He is chased through a wooded area by a group of men, including one armed with a powerful rifle and another with a shotgun. In a video-game-like development, he goes from being a complete novice with a handgun to an almost John Woo character. Akiko appears on the sidelines of the gun action, an ambiguous figure at best. She flirts with Sano. Is she somehow involved with the plot against Yoshii?
It’s all very Hitchcockian, if not quite as satisfactory as it should be. The film’s final, also video-game-like shootout, occurs in a warehouse with dark spaces and stairways reminiscent of the work of Dutch surrealist M.C. Escher. The building’s interior is murky, maze-like, and frightening, considering it is full of people who are armed and intent on killing one another. The ending comes out of left field and doesn’t quite fit with what comes before it. But “Cloud” shows us how e-thievery can explode into a hail of bullets and a pile of massacred bodies. What happened? The brave, new e-world happened.
‘Cloud’
Rating: Not rated (In Japanese with subtitles)
Cast: Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira
Writer-Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes
Where to Watch: The Brattle
Grade: B
Boston Movie News 