Cloud (Kuraudo, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2024)

Psychospace

I thought Weapons-- Zach Cregger's brilliantly structured supernatural thriller about seventeen children running out their front doors and vanishing into the night-- was hot shit, arguably the best horror of 2025; along comes Kurosawa Kiyoshi saying "hold my beer."

(WARNING: plot and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail!) 

Cregger starts out at a leisurely pace, tracing the story of one character then another; Kiyoshi practically locks down his camera to focus on one Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), an internet reseller callously coaxing an aged couple to let him have a set of medical diagnostic devices at ruinously low prices. When he goes online advertising said devices at a huge markup, he watches as the items flip from 'on sale' red to 'sold out' green-- you sense satisfaction but for all the emotion shown he could have been monitoring his blood pressure.

Cloud's first third is just that-- a character study on Yoshii, who has a factory boss named Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), a girlfriend named Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), and a friend named Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) who introduced him to the reselling business in the first place. The boss likes Yoshii-- sings praises of him, even offers him a promotion-- but he seems unengaged; the girlfriend is affectionate and he's more responsive but; the friend offers partnership in an online auction platform. Yoshii politely considers each in turn but the only image that really holds his eye are the red lights turning green. 

Kiyoshi takes the premise of his breakthrough hit Pulse and expands it, suggesting the internet isn't just the afterlife it's the only life, with a high score you must hit before rising to the next level; the fact that you're only connected through a stream of electrons grants you protection, a wifi force field that shields you from the wrath of the people you exploit. 

Only that force field is illusory as Yoshii learns in the second third. If Cregger varies his storytelling by dropping one narrative strand to take up another, Kiyoshi varies his by morphing his film into a different form-- in this case a cat-and-mouse stalk, where Yoshii learns that the internet as opposed to insulating actually integrates, in this case folks like his former boss and a yakuza gangster and an experienced hunter and an old friend and a random stranger, all brought together by the common cause of payback for the harm he's dealt them. And yet another lesson: that they feel the same sense of security Yoshii feels, and this has the effect of lowering one's inhibitions, encourages the speaking out lashing out acting out of people from beyond the anonymity of the cloud into the real world. 

You see the progression: Yoshii's interactions start out as quiet, civil, dictated by society's polite rules of discourse; as Yoshii moves from his Tokyo apartment to a house in the countryside (taking Akiko with him and hiring Sano (Daiken Okudaira) as his assistant along the way) the conversation moves online and grows openly hostile, especially in a chat room dedicated to doxxing and locating the reseller. After a period of calm-- of false security-- men show up at Yoshii's door, and Kiyoshi records the event with the same deadpan he uses to record conversations both online and off: same shit, different day.  

In the final third the film morphs into a first-person shooter game complete with elaborate multilevel layout and an array of weapons; Kiyoshi adds one touch of realism, that perhaps half if not nearly all the people involved are unfamiliar with firearms. Most onscreen shootouts depict combatants with two-fisted preternatural skill; watching terrified human beings shake and fumble and drop their weapons is almost a novelty ("Cover me!" yells one man; the other stares as if he had spoken Greek), and it's a different kind of suspense wondering who manages to learn how to use their weapon properly first, Yoshii, or his pursuers. 

And then there's Yoshii's assistant, Sano. Who's unswervingly loyal, even when Yoshii hands him severance pay for trying to meddle in the resell business; who seems able to draw on uncannily deep pockets ("Need the van? Keep it"); who apparently has ties to some large criminal organization (the Yakuza?); who-- and this for me was his most impressive flex-- constantly (if politely) turns down repeated requests to come back to said organization, and is still able to call on them for help and resources.

Who's Sano? One might say he's Kiyoshi's most pretentious twist, the filmmaker's way of leveraging a run of the mill (if uncommonly wrought) crime flick to the level of arthouse; or one might say he's Kiyoshi's last twist, the fulfillment of his deceptively simple concept and the picture's final form, a briefly sketched variant of the apocalyptic visions glimpsed at in Pulse and Charisma-- in short Yoshii's ultimate reward for a lifetime of amorality. Yoshii smiles, but he's sweating as he smiles-- could just be anxiety or could be he's getting close and starting to feel the heat.