The prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure) has at his best a strange genius for finding the strange—often sinister—gathering like dust in the dark corners of ordinary modern life. In Cloud , just announced as Japan’s submission for the International Academy Awards, the director gives that impulse a compelling, dark update, turning it into an unconventional Internet-age drama that degenerates into a revenge action movie so disjointed it’s almost existential: Beckett gives both sides.
The linchpin between the two modes in the film is Yoshi (played wonderfully by Masaki Suda), who also works as a double agent. In real life, he’s a hardworking, if unengaged, garment factory worker; online, he goes by the name “Ratel,” and runs a shady resale network that’s his real interest and his real livelihood. At the beginning of Cloud , Yoshi inspects a shipment of “therapy devices” put up for quick sale by a desperate manufacturer. Casually, he offers the man a lower price for all thirty devices than he’ll later ask for just one unit — take it or leave it. The man accepts, despite his wife’s angry protests. Yoshi drives off with his boxed-up loot, advertises it that same night, and watches, with the only real glimmer of pleasure we’ll ever see him display, as the listings swing from for sale to pending to sold. Within minutes, he’s won tens of thousands of dollars, but like any gambler, his satisfaction is short-lived. He needs to satisfy his desire to win the following points.
Yoshi has a girlfriend, Akiko (Kotoni Furukawa), whose fickle materialism he succumbs to without letting her know the true extent of his profits. He also has a former resale mentor, Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), whom he quickly outgrows. Yoshi’s calm waters may not be particularly deep, but there are undercurrents of greed and ego bubbling beneath his placid surface, so when his factory boss offers him a promotion after his big win, Yoshi resigns with disdain. When Muraoka suggests they collaborate on a new venture, he declines again. Instead, Yoshi doubles down on his e-commerce instincts, moving from his cramped apartment to a spacious, secluded lakeside home that pretends to be a lifestyle choice but is really just a larger base of operations. He even hires local kid Sano (Daiken Okudaira) as his assistant in expanding his business, on the condition that he never touches Yoshi’s computer.
There’s another reason behind Yoshi’s sudden move to a new home: he hasn’t sent any email to his new address. While Yoshi had no idea how organized Ratel’s angry customers and unpaid suppliers were against him, Yoshi has learned that he’s unpopular, and that his identity is in danger of being exposed due to a dead rat on his doorstep and an electrical wire causing a motorcycle accident. But threatening incidents follow him and Akiko to their new home. And with the authorities searching for Yoshi’s latest scheme involving counterfeit handbags, he’ll have no one to turn to for protection if the attacks escalate.
But what makes these events escalate? Up until this point, the drama has been fairly believable, unfolding in a realistic register enriched by director Yasuyuki Sasaki’s stylish cinematography, which makes even the most drab and sparsely set backdrops rich with shadow and lurking danger. But things are about to get serious, as several of Yoshi/Ratel’s aggrieved colleagues team up to become a kind of collective catharsis and amplification of the frustrations of all the buyers and sellers who have been swindled by an unscrupulous middleman. The game ends with a darkly funny multiplayer shootout—and the language of the video games is fitting, given the general warehouse setting could belong to any number of first-person shooters. There’s even a sequence where Yoshi and his lone ally team up for an attack, hiding behind a series of conveniently crumbling walls that looks like a live-action movie scene from a Call of Duty game.
But it’s only in the final stretch that we find some exaggeration, when the horrific backdrop and some of the slapdash dialogue hint at a grandeur that belies the smallness of the characters and their sordid motivations so far. For all his dark web sleuthing and trawling, Yoshi is no clear villain, and his attackers aren’t clear victims. They all occupy different points on the luck/bad luck spectrum when it comes to playing the new, ruthless economy of online life, which is very much like the old one of swindling the common man, but now, isolated by the anonymity of the internet, you no longer have to look him in the eye. Imagine how differently we might have acted if we’d known, as Cloud cleverly imagines, that every click of the cursor was the equivalent of cocking a loaded gun.
