Cloud: an online hustle turns deadly in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s violent, freewheeling thriller

• Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film Festival

Buying stuff online has been a mundane convenience for years, but leave it to Kurosawa Kiyoshi to tap into the torrents of bad mojo coursing through the world of internet resale. In the genre-creeping Cloud, the fast-and-loose tactics of one such reseller causes others to retaliate, veering a dogged character study into the wilds of vigilantism, with chilling implications about ethics and capitalism.

Kurosawa doesn’t exactly start us off in a safe zone, either, introducing wheeler dealer Yoshii Ryōsuke (Suda Masaki) as he badgers an older couple into selling an inventory of medical devices at a discount, which he later hawks online. Otherwise resigned to his factory day job, Ryōsuke gets goaded by a friend (Kubota Masataka) into pursuing something bigger. Much of the movie’s first half is given over to Ryōsuke’s pursuit of products to buy and resell; his goods are displayed on his computer as rows of icons that each change colour with a winning bid. Eventually relocating to suburban outskirts, he works out of an industrial looking silver-toned condo, accompanied by his increasingly bored and directionless girlfriend Akiko (Furukawa Kotone).

Kurosawa has always been able to make the most ordinary room hum with disquiet or latent violence. Ryōsuke’s home feels unnervingly lifeless even with the addition of an assistant, Sano (Okudaira Daiken), bringing a dash of spry next-gen energy. But Sano soon uncovers an army of enraged customers online who rail against Ryōsuke (or rather ‘Ratel,’ his merchant moniker) and vow revenge. Ryōsuke fires Sano for snooping, but when another reseller is badly beaten by a customer over Ryōsuke’s faulty product, the morose spiralling drama of his internet hustle ratchets into the horrors of home invasion and armed pursuit.

Kurosawa’s work regularly features characters impelled by mysteriously unleashed forces – systems, whether supernatural or otherwise irrational, that take furious hold – but just as unsettling is how social contagion comes into play. We’ve previously met some of the motley crew who one day appear on Ryōsuke’s doorstep to deliver payback – one is his formerly avuncular manager at the factory – but banding together seems to have peeled away their inhibitions. As the armed intruders chase Ryōsuke through his house and later a factory, it ’s as if ordinary life has been replaced by a prolonged chase sequence (“You’re about to enter a world of pain!” somebody actually says). Ryōsuke, now the prey, must switch gears from unscrupulous e-commerce to evading gunshots.

But the onslaught is not presented as a laudable comeuppance; instead, there’s a freewheeling menace which could recall a Purge movie. At least one of the attackers has participated in group vengeance like this before, boasting, “We do what we want.” But Ryōsuke also has a formidable pro at his back: fresh-faced Sano, apparently a former yakuza, back to help his boss thanks to some ambiguous code of justice. This injects yet another kind of violence into the film, that of the trained killer (and Kurosawa, never one to shy away from pure madness, also gives one of the assailants a surprise berserk backstory). The action plays out unpredictably, thanks to the sloppiness and lack of nerve on the part of the amateur hitmen, one of whom cravenly covers his face for fear of repercussions.

For all the genre flourishes, Kurosawa is illustrating how the internet can facilitate the radicalisation of the worst of human behaviour and help people connect and manifest it in the world at large. But something’s also rotten here in the unsavoury aspects of buying and selling that we take for granted; the horror lies not in some undefined spectral force, but perhaps the numbing mechanisms of capitalism and commodification. Ryōsuke’s girlfriend is perhaps too bluntly in thrall to these forces, seemingly defined by and hollowed out by her wants. But Ryōsuke too has lost his way, obsessed with his merchandise and chasing a sale even when his life is in danger – behaviour organically put across by Suda (who voiced the grey heron trickster of 2023’s The Boy and the Heron). 

Kurosawa’s steady control of mood and indefatigable narrative – if this becomes an action film, it ’s not geared to our titillation – prevent any of this from becoming didactic. But at the end, a surprising metaphysical moment that has an almost Faustian flair leaves little question of Kurosawa’s view of the venality and loss of life we’ve witnessed. The director’s work remains too captivating and faithful to the mysteries of human nature to tag the film simply as anti-capitalist, but when it comes to malaise in internet-turbocharged liberal economies, Kurosawa’s film suggests the call is coming from within the house.

► Cloud is in UK cinemas now.