Cloud Is The Perfect Unnerving Technological Thriller For Our Times
It’s much more dangerous to be a reseller than you think.
In Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new unnerving tech thriller, the titular cloud seems like it would be referring to the data cloud, where all our digital information goes to be stored. It is, after all, a film about a reseller whose ruthless tactics get him in trouble with the dark side of the internet. But the title could also describe the oppressive pall that hangs over the entire movie, bathing the film in a disquieting dread that feels both intimately familiar and unknowable. It’s kind of like the feeling of being on the internet.
There’s perhaps no contemporary director that understands the true horrors of modern technology than Kiyoshi Kurosawa. His 2001 ghost movie, Pulse, was one of the earliest horror films to nail the chilly loneliness of the internet. And, 24 years later, Kurosawa returns to the techno-horror genre with Cloud, an eerie, lean noir thriller that charts an unnerving odyssey through the strange underworld of online resellers.
Yes, that’s right, this is a thriller about resellers, the seedy contingent of people who make a business out of ripping off suppliers and retailers and marking up prices to absurd degrees. It seems a strange topic for a film as dark and anxious about the latent evils of the internet as Cloud, but Kurosawa manages to turn a story about one particularly callous reseller into a paranoid saga about living under the cold grip of late capitalism.
In Cloud, Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is an inconspicuous factory worker who moonlights as a reseller in his free time. But he’s managed to rise above the rest because of his ruthless techniques: in the opening scene, we see him coldly rip off a group of vulnerable health device suppliers, who are concerned about his intentions but can find no reason to stop him. When he arrives at his small apartment, cluttered with boxes of resale items, he sits stone-faced at his computer, watching the blinking lights of each of those health devices go on sale. Slowly, they’re each purchased, and Yoshii finally lets out a sigh and cracks a smile — a tiny sign that he’s human after all. But as his resale business takes off and Yoshii decides to move to an isolated house in the country to conduct his business full-time, those small glimpses of humanity grow fewer and farther between. And as Yoshii becomes more engrossed in his work, he starts to grow increasingly paranoid that he’s being stalked by some unknown presence.
Like last year’s disturbingly revealing true-crime thriller Red Rooms, Cloud feels like a window into a ubiquitous evil. Namely, the internet, and how it is no longer just a tool, but a corrupting influence in and of itself. Yoshii, played with an eerily stony stoicism by Suda, only comes to life when he’s made a sale — evidenced by his near-orgasmic gasp he makes whenever the lights on his computer all flash “SOLD.” And even as his life spirals out of control — his bored girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa) leaving him after it’s clear that his resale business is his one passion, and his enterprising assistant Sano (Daiken Okudaira) showing a little too much ambition — his focus on his business feels single-minded to the point of obsession. When his life truly takes a turn for the worse, with a group of anonymous stalkers deciding to exact violent revenge on Yoshii, he still displays an absurd obsession with his sales — even, potentially, at the cost of his own life.
You’ll never guess where Cloud will take you.
Cloud unfolds like a haunting, dread-filled dream that quickly transforms into a hellish nightmare once it reaches its action-packed climax. Despite its slow-burning beginnings, Cloud reveals itself to be a surprisingly lean and nasty thriller, one with an explosive third act that takes the film in a direction you would never expect. In one long, nail-biting action sequence, which Kurosawa deliberately stages without a score, Cloud suddenly transforms into a bloody revenge thriller, one that unmasks the horrifying true nature of humanity. It’s like a descent into a hell that already exists on Earth.
Cloud might be the most honest techno-horror thriller — or at least the most relavent today. It takes the loneliness of living in the digital world and makes it violent. It takes a somewhat absurd premise — disgruntled internet users exact revenge on a reseller! — and turns it into a horrifying allegory about what the internet can do to us. With Cloud, Kurosawa simply peels back the curtain to expose the truly rotten core of our digital society.
