Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s filmography already includes several films where the horror and techno-thriller genres meet, reflecting a world where technology overwhelms its heroes and terrifies the audience. ‘Cloud‘ (‘Kuraudo‘ in the original – 2024) can be included in this category, although the fantastic element does not appear in any material form. The cloud is one of those notions belonging to the Internet world that has the potential to intimidate us through ambiguity. The hero of the film written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa starts out as a user of the cloud and when you realize that it has enveloped his life it may be too late.
‘Samurai’, Jean-Pierre Melville’s famous ‘film noir’ from 1967 whose story takes place in Paris, proposed as an anti-hero a lone gangster whose prototype was borrowed from the Japanese culture. The hero (or anti-hero) of ‘Cloud‘ lives in Tokyo and is a citizen of the age of global communication. He is an ambitious and intelligent young man named Ryôsuke Yoshii, who, dissatisfied with his factory job and the slow prospects for advancement there, spends his free time buying and reselling second-hand items on the Internet. After making a small fortune by selling electro-medical devices at a profit, he decides to abandon his job and move with his girlfriend Akiko to a lakeside villa and devote himself full-time to his business in the cloud. It is not long before Yoshii is suspected by the police of selling counterfeit goods and pursued by customers and other individuals hit by his activities that are at the edge of or beyond the limits of legality. How long will a pseudonym and the apparent anonymity of Internet users protect him? Are Akiko or his assistant Miyake allies he can rely on?
Like Melville’s Samurai, Yoshii is a hero that viewers shouldn’t like. He’s clearly after profit and is too intelligent not to realize that what he’s doing is illegal and hurts others. He continues anyway. Bad character? Capitalist venality? Internet addiction? Here too, the lead actor delivers such a strong and nuanced performance that viewers can’t help but feel empathy. The first half of the film works excellently as a psychological thriller, especially thanks to Masaki Suda‘s performance. When the story moves outside the city, we briefly feel like we’re in one of those horror films with a city couple moving to a lonely villa around which a still unclear threat is growing. Soon, however, the threat materializes, and the last part of the film switches genres from horror and film noir to action. Virtual violence turns into physical violence. The psychological confrontations to gunfights. Some viewers will be disappointed. I wasn’t, because Kiyoshi Kurosawa saves a few surprises for the end, including psychological ones, that change the perspective on what happened. The experience was more than satisfying for me.