When Kiyoshi Kurosawa exploded onto the international scene with “Cure” in 1997, it could be assumed that he could coast along making creepy slow burn horror films for the rest of his career like Hideo Nakata (“The Ring”) and Takashi Shimizu (“The Grudge”) when the J-Horror movement was a tide that lifted all boats. “Cure” itself wasn’t the easiest fit amongst those films in terms of how exactly the serial killer thriller got under the skin, but the director nonetheless made “Seance” and “Pulse” in short order in its wake before spreading his wings to a variety of different genres. Over two decades later, Kurosawa’s latest “Cloud” seems poised to take the world by storm when the director brings all that experience to bear on a film that is delightfully difficult to get a handle on.
In some ways, “Cloud” combines eras as it begins to follow Ryusuke Yushii (Masaki Suda), a lowly factory worker who is seeking fortune elsewhere by spending any spare time with his eyes squarely fixed on online auctions, looking for underpriced items he can resell at a premium. Unassuming at work where he shrugs off the mention of a promotion by his boss Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), he is savage when it comes to his resale game, giving less business-savvy entrepreneurs little choice but to hand over their goods to him to turn a profit and cares little about reselling counterfeit brand name items when operating under an alias. This doesn’t earn him much love online, but even at home, his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) seems to be on the fence when he isn’t making enough to afford the lifestyle she desires and after Takimoto presses a little too hard to make him a junior section chief, Yushii decides to devote him full-time to reselling, finding enough success to even hire an assistant in Sano (Daiken Okudaira), who is suspiciously grateful for the opportunity.
In “Pulse,” Kurosawa explored the possibility of a computer being haunted and while “Cloud” never dips into the supernatural, the director once again finds terror from both the physical and virtual worlds as Yushii is glued to his monitor and his already frazzled nerves, depending on the outcome of an auction, are shaken to a greater degree by odd things happening around him, having a car motor tossed through his window and himself tossed off his motorcycle in what looks to be a targeted attack. He’s not paranoid for thinking someone is after him, but the answer is crazier than could be expected as “Cloud” shifts gears numerous times to deliver healthy doses of horror, action and suspense when it seems like he could get his comeuppance for the people he’s stiffed.
It’s rare to root for someone who resembles the kind of person that’s probably ripped you off at some point in your life, but Kurosawa has a unique protagonist on his hands in Yushii, who is made into less of a villain in comparison to the almighty dollar that drives him, always trying to downplay its power over him in conversation, but every cutthroat action showing its influence. You’d prefer to see him tortured than succeed, which is what makes the film’s second half so enjoyable when a former classmate Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), who’s fallen on hard times after Yushii balked at a joint investment in the kind of online auction platform they both used for resales, starts to connect the dots about a mysterious alias he think might belong to him. Chaos commences, but it’s never out of the control of Kurosawa, whose mastery can be seen in every decisive cut and whip-pan and when nobody ends up apologizing for any of their behavior in “Cloud,” that includes the filmmaker who has made his most unapologetically fun film to date.
“Cloud” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on September 7th at the Sala Casino at 2:30 pm.