‘Cloud’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Japan. 2024. 124mins

What happens when an online hate mob spews out of the chat rooms and onto the streets? When virtual anger becomes literal violence? It’s a timely question at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s visceral but sprawling latest film. Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) exists in a moral grey area – an opportunistic ‘reseller’, he makes a living by flipping goods that he buys at knockdown prices and sells at a premium. It’s a precarious existence, and one that has made him numerous enemies over the years. But while cyberspace is his marketplace, it is also a weapon that is turned against him: the internet coalesces his anonymous enemies into a vengeful, heavily armed gang, intent on justice. 

The themes that the film explores are uncomfortably of the moment.

A film of two halves, Cloud’s excessive, bullet-strafed second section is more effective than the restrained and sluggish first part. The themes it explores are uncomfortably of the moment. British audiences will see parallels with the recent racist riots stirred up on social media; other countries will likely have their own similar reference points.

The pernicious power of the internet has long exerted a fascination on Kurosawa; his 2001 picture Pulse depicted the web as a portal through which supernatural evil could enter the world. More than 20 years on, the central concept hasn’t changed so much. Kurosawa has lost the paranormal aspect of the conceit (bar a clunky final scene) but the idea of the internet as an incubator for malign forces remains. Uneven but energetic, it’s watchable stuff – although perhaps not distinctive enough in its approach and themes to gain traction outside of Kurosawa’s existing fanbase.

Making a living in the way that Ryosuke does (he has a menial job in a factory as a cover for his real business as an online seller) requires the art of turning a blind eye. Ryosuke knows that some of the products that he sells are fakes, but he doesn’t ask and would prefer not to know. The same is true of his relationships. Muraota (Masataka Kubota), the friend from grade school who introduced him to reselling, talks fondly of their bond, but his smile looks like a murder waiting to happen. And sweet, doll-faced Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), Ryosuke’s girlfriend, pouts adorably when Ryosuke spends too much time wheeling and dealing on auction sites, but can’t wait to spend his money. 

While Ryosuke is deliberately blind to the flaws in his products, he’s increasingly aware of a formless sense of unease that dogs his life in Tokyo. A new start, in a large house by a lake in the countryside, buys him a few days peace. But then the building is targeted in a seemingly random act of violence and Akiko, defeated by Ryosuke’s top-of-the-range coffee machine, decides that home-making in the sticks is not her idea of fun. All of which contributes to the slow build of tension which explodes in a hail of gunfire in the picture’s final forty minutes – the warehouse setting and the body count evokes that of Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire.

Ryosuke is ambivalent as a character rather than an out-and-out monster – he’s a product of a business culture that has dispensed with honour and embraced a more Trumpian ethos of treating customers and contacts alike as suckers to be outwitted. And while his attackers run the gamut from the weak and impressionable to the righteously aggrieved to the dangerously deranged, Kurosawa stresses that the real villain of the piece is the distorting power of the internet. As an incongruous metaphysical final scene makes emphatically clear, through our dependence on the cyber sphere we are existing in a hell of our own making.