(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024, Japan, 124 minutes)
"You operate on impulse and instinct? No effort whatsoever?"--prospective seller
"That's how I work."--Yoshii
Yoshii (The Boy and the Heron's Masaki Suda) works in a laundry factory by day. Though he could earn more as a manager, a promotion his pushy boss offers more than a few times, he would prefer to manage things rather than people. Company man Mr. Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa from Bong Joon-ho's Tokyo! contribution "Shaking Tokyo"), who mistakenly believes they're cut from the same cloth, can't understand why his employee wouldn't want to trade freedom and unpredictability for stability and repetition.
In his spare time, Yoshii pursues his true passion: buying and reselling medical equipment, collectible figurines, and knockoff luxury goods. He takes photos of the items, posts them online, strings together a few persuasive key words, and waits for customers to click the "buy" button.
Granted, Yoshii isn't a thief, and he ships the products he sells, but he underpays for merchandise, uses deceptive pricing, and fails to verify authenticity before listing designer wares, generating resentment among buyers and sellers alike. Initially, though, no one reaches out directly to complain, so he feels no shame and suffers no consequences. Granted, he uses a pseudonym, Ratel--the Dutch word for honey badger--so it isn't as if disgruntled associates can look him up online, though that will soon change.
Yoshii might sound like a loner, except he isn't, and Suda doesn't play him as someone especially off-putting. Moral complications aside, he looks and acts like a regular guy. If he isn't a hero–and he doesn't necessarily qualify as an antihero–he isn't a villain either, but rather the catalyst for an uprising against a virtual world that has exacerbated capitalism's worst tendencies. His enemies list, which grows throughout the film, consists of buyers, sellers, and others even shadier than him.
Though his sweet-faced girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), initially seems like a port in the storm, she's possibly the worst kind of partner for someone like Yoshii, because she encourages him to amp up his activities regardless as to the repercussions, so she can quit her job, buy a fancy espresso maker, and move to a bigger place. "I'll buy this and that," she enthuses. "There's so much I want." Her avarice makes it easier for Yoshii to justify his actions.
One day someone leaves a dead rat outside his door. Then someone strings a trip wire between trees in front of his building, causing him to take a spill on his scooter. Could it be an unhappy seller, his resentful boss, or the schoolmate who becomes peevish when he refuses to invest in his new auction platform? One way or the other, Yoshii feels like he's being watched.
Despite the move, Yoshii still feels like he's being watched. It's a common experience for a character in a Kurosawa film. Though Cure took inspiration from Silence of the Lambs, and Pulse was remade in English in the wake of the Ring phenomenon, his films aren't horror in the conventional sense.
Cloud can be chilling at times, but the disorienting ambiguity recalls Michael Haneke's psychological thriller Caché, more than the average American narrative with a known antagonist. Once the source of the antagonism becomes known, however, the film switches into a different register.
Joseph Heller's famous Catch-22 adage "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you" applies, because strange things keep happening, and I don't think it's all in his head, though knowing Kurosawa, it could be (for what it's worth, I've always associated that quote with the Nixon presidency, though Heller's book was published in 1961).
Yoshii hasn't changed his ways, in fact, he's expanded his operations, and so the stalker--or stalkers--maintains their campaign of intimidation, undeterred by the change in location. As it turns out, resentment has been building over Yoshii's tactics for so long that the online furor has spilled over into the physical world.
What he didn't know didn't hurt him, but Sano helps him to connect the dots. It's Kurosawa's way of showing how the things that happen online can have real-world consequences beyond the obvious. A customer who feels ripped off, after all, isn't just a screen name, but an actual human being.
By the end, Yoshii is on the run from an armed posse, and the film segues from horror chills to satiric thrills involving a man who has made so many enemies that even his girlfriend, his assistant, and the cops–who know about the counterfeit goods–can't be counted on to get him out of the jam.
It's one of Kurosawa's best thrillers in years, not necessarily because it represents a return to his roots, though it does, but because he's working with some of the same thought-provoking themes and spooky cues as before, while brightening the corners with his mastery of action and humor, and just when it seems as if the film couldn't get any darker or violent, it doesn't. It swerves, though the underlying message is blacker than black.
It isn't disappointing either, since Yoshii, and his honey badger ways, turns out to be one of his more captivating protagonists. With Masaki Suda's placid appearance and pragmatic affect, he has a certain blank quality; not bland, but open to a variety of readings. Where some saw a scoundrel, I saw someone who was a victim of the same system that ensnares us all. Love him or loathe him, you'll want to see exactly how his story plays out.
Cloud, which premiered in Seattle at SIFF 2025, opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Fri, Aug 15. Images from the IMDb (Masaki Suda and super-creepy stalker), Wallpaper Magazine (Suda and Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), MovieWeb (Suda and Kotone Furukawa), and Austin Film Society (Suda).
