You have to respect workhorse filmmakers who bang out 3 films a year and rarely miss. It’s a class of veteran savoy that is rare even among the best of them, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa earns his stripes by living behind the camera and delivering one banger after another. “Cloud” is no exception, a haunting pressure cooker comprised of Kurosawa’s incredible patience that is always rewarded in the end. He has a knack for cluing you in on exactly what he wants to say but never giving away too much, keeping an ace or two up his sleeve to keep you strung along until he slams his winning hand down on the table. Films like “Cure” and “Pulse” embrace this unique style, and while “Cloud” may not be considered one of his genuine masterpieces – that’s probably reserved for something like “Cure” for me – it too embraces this signature style and takes you on an unpredictable journey that keeps you guessing and glued to the screen.
Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, “Cloud” is another take down of our ever growing relationship with technology and internet anonymity, something Kurosawa has always been interested in and continues to find new ways to examine and export his ideas about humans and computers. It’s fascinating that he imbues this with all of the same warnings your typical “robots will take over the world” messaging you’d find in a standard man vs machine sci-fi film without any of the sci-fi elements or narrative framework. Instead, Kurosawa grounds his themes in the modern internet age, and follows Yoshii – an internet reseller whose aggressive online antics and carelessness (both in person and virtual) leaves a long line of annoymous enemies in his wake. The bill comes due for Yoshii as the many people he’s hurt begin terrorizing him online and in real life, becoming a cat and mouse game that escalates into a life threatening struggle for survival.
It stars Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama and Yoshiyoshi Arakawa.
This film is highly critical of the success at all costs mantra that often permeates most of our lives, and particularly targets the internet hustle and get rich quick schemes as a prime example of what is destroying our humanity. These screens that fuel our existence and are supposed to make life easier essentially turn us into inhumane monsters, something film is very interested in unpacking. As it begins, Kurosawa refuses to hold your hand or give you any information as to where things are going. Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is a loser protagonist, someone we’re not actually meant to root for but spend the most amount of time with. Suda is dialed in as a performer, and carries “Cloud” with a subtle selfish energy and quiet emptiness masked by his pursuit of more, well, everything. Slowly but surely we begin to put the pieces together of how he sees the world: everything is a transaction – relationships, products, identity, technology etc – it’s all for sale and Yoshii is willing to give up every piece of himself in pursuit of the next big money maker.
Even his relationships with his lover Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) and his new assistant Sano (Daiken Okudaira) are transactional and purposefully feel contrived and distant. “Cloud” almost feels alienating to the audience with how basic human interactions are intentionally awkward every time Yoshii has to speak or interact with someone. But Kurosawa is acutely aware of this, and only sits in the affronting pragmatism for the first act. It’s cold and brutal yet quietly assertive, and the insidiousness of the internet takes some time to fully form. Once it starts to take shape, it launches itself into a consistently escalating thriller that culminates in one of the most surprising third act turns I’ve ever seen. No spoilers, but I’ll say this much: I did not have Kurosawa does Quinten Tarantino on my cinema bingo card. It explodes in its final moments, as if the whole first half of the film is just seething with pent up aggression and unloads with a firefight of tension release.
Ultimately, it stands on the idea that the internet is the root of humanity’s corruption and that our culture of commerce at all costs brought on by late stage capitalism destroys us all to the core. The longer we sit behind screens to shield our identity, the less human we become, until all that’s left is a shell of a man driven solely by the next score. These are some lofty, heavy ideas, but they are baked into what is probably Kurosawa’s funniest film to date. For all its postering and grand statements about the modern world, it is actually pretty damn funny and even at times downright silly. It never stops being unsettling or thrilling, but as a testament to Kurosawa’s experimental phase of genre mashing, he injects more humor into a rather bleak and dark story than you would expect. The guy just knows how to make movies, and everything in “Cloud” comes together to create a genuinely great one. Exquisite camerawork and masterful framing keep viewers locked in even when it seems like nothing is happening because something is ALWAYS happening.
“Cloud” accurately identifies our own isolation and internet illness through a sometimes funny, sometimes haunting, always thrilling cautionary tale that lures you in with a sense of unnerving calm and then lets the bullets fly with an exciting conclusion. The road to hell is paved with online commerce, and we’re all just one bad day and one bad internet away from losing ourselves completely and becoming consumed by greed, violence, and more because it’s not us – it’s our username.
The payoffs in “Cloud” land hard, and I dug the hell out of this bold swing from a genuine master.
Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
“Cloud” is in select theaters July 18th. You can watch the trailer below.
