Cloud

When someone’s career is as long-standing and well-documented as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s, one often finds oneself wondering how to, yet again, begin a reflection on his latest work – his third film in a single calendar year? If we are to follow his films, the start would be in medias res, distant, cold, and display the most rudimentary facts about the world, so that might be a good beginning. Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest thriller, which verges on social horror, recently premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival and is also screening in Toronto's Luminaries section, which features works by the world’s most influential art-house filmmakers.

Ryosuke (Masaki Suda) is an internet reseller. At the very beginning, we see him negotiating a low price with an older couple for a product they’ve developed. They beg him to meet them halfway because Ryosuke’s price doesn’t even begin to cover their production costs, but he won’t budge, insisting that the product is useless – though he’s still willing to take the risk. In the very next scene, we see him posting the ads for the whole batch of that product online, listing them for 200,000 yen per box, up from the 3000 per box he paid. Seeing Ryosuke, as he sits in his small, crammed studio apartment, anxiously staring at his laptop and waiting for something to change on the screen, either bringing him good news that he’s rich, or bad news that he’s broke – you start to project onto him.

Even though we’re essentially talking about a basic shot-reverse shot exchange, framed in creeping wide angles, juxtaposed with close-ups, the feeling is comparable to watching a getaway heist. What Ryouske is trying to pull off is commensurate with a heist, only he’s not in control of the pace and the ultimate outcome, leaving it to an entity unknown to him on the screen, making all the stiffness and stillness even more anxious. You feel the stakes, simply by looking at the environment around him and how tense he is in the shot – a good sale could change his life, while a bad one could be devastating.

One might even see the echoes of recent “eat the rich” films, where you’re rooting for the underdog to hustle the world around him, just to get ahead in their life. However, what we soon find out is that this anxious display is not a nervous awaiting of news that will determine the quality of protagonist’s life, but an addiction, where other people are a means of delivering a high. As the story is unfolding, we find that Ryosuke very much has his ways out of his predicament, but what has once been a life of easy money without too much effort, has turned into a high-stakes, gambling-against-yourself, type of lifestyle where the highs are great, and lows potentially deadly. In that sense, the meaning behind the title of the film is twofold, the film is not just dealing with internet, or rather, cloud-based crimes, but the very nature of the crime is the protagonist “blowing smoke”, as the expression says, about the product he’s selling.

Over time, the general anxious atmosphere starts to transform into very real threats on the protagonist's life that briefly even verges on the oneiric. Said atmosphere makes you feel like a threat could be creeping in from the seemingly calmest moments of rest, until the eventual eruption of violence ensues, turning into a cat-and-mouse chase culminating in a prolonged Mexican standoff. At that moment one might feel like we’re watching a moralistic tale of hybris and failure, but quite the opposite turns out to be the case. The final outcome might even be deemed too unrealistically neat and convenient, but that might also be the film’s biggest strength because we’re witnessing the triumph of evil. There are no lessons to be learned, no character arc to be reached etc. These days, where stances on society and politics are sown into everything, it’s rare to see something that unapologetically leads to the triumph of evil, even at the expense of the suspense of disbelief.