Cloud: Japanese Thriller about the Perils of Capitalism Doesn’t Cash in on Its Premise

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

At his best, Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa makes films that are both easy to absorb and hard to forget, genre-bending thrillers wrapped in philosophical parables about the gap between the self and others.

Beneath the ingenious versions of familiar genres — neo-noir, invasion drama, techno thriller — Kurosawa’s films typically record the process of some compulsively destructive force that acts through human agents.

His best-known films are 1997’s thriller Cure, about serial killer operating through viral hypnotism, and 2001's Pulse, about ghosts that leak through the internet. A more recent drama, Before We Vanish (2019) featured aliens that harvest “concepts” from their human hosts, leaving their victims missing a piece of their intellectual equipment.

His latest, Cloud — which was Japan’s Oscar submission last year — focuses on a more familiar and banal dark force at work: capitalism, but in the digital age, pumped up on steroids. The drama follows Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a glum young Tokyo worker who operates a machine in a clothing factory.

He has a side hustle as an online reseller under the name “Ratel” (meaning badger), buying products cheaply from desperate suppliers, including health devices, collectable dolls, and fake designer handbags, before reselling them online for a substantial profit.

When Yoshii is pressured to accept a promotion by his foreman (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), he declines and resigns his job to instead go into the reselling business full time. He passes up an offer to work with a former schoolmate and reselling mentor, Muraoka (Masataka Kubota).

When Muraoka runs into Yoshii with his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) on the street, he remarks sourly, “I didn’t know you’d found conventional happiness.” Clearly, that’s something no truly dedicated hustler would descend to settle for.

Subsequently, Yoshii invites Akiko to move in with him in his new home in the country, though it’s not the lifestyle upgrade she imagines it to be. The home will be a new base and storage centre for Yoshii’s business at a safe distance from the increasingly unhappy customers. He hires a local unemployed youth Sano (Saiden Okudaira) as a gofer and the young man soon becomes Yoshii’s fervent disciple.

As the weeks pass, Yoshii becomes more emotionally isolated and more ruthless in his pursuit of profit. Akiko grows tired of being ignored and after a half-hearted attempt to seduce the assistant Sano, she decides to go back to the city.

Later, Yoshii fires Sano as well, for using his computer and having the gall to suggest new products. Meanwhile, his many aggrieved suppliers, customers and others he has offended have connected in an online forum, urging each other on to exact revenge.

For its first hour, Cloud plays like a dramatic allegory of what Karl Marx called “commodity fetishism:” the way people treat products as if they have inherent value separate from the social processes and labour that created them, and how capitalists treat people as commodities.

There are telling scenes of Yoshii staring hypnotically at icons on rows of boxes on his computer screen standing for items for sale. Each time a person makes a purchase, a “sold” sign appears on the icon.

Cloud is, in effect, in two distinct parts. And the second half is not nearly as good as the first half.

In Marx’s reasoning, violence is embedded in capitalism (“Capital comes dripping, from head to toe from every pore, with blood and dirt.”) And that violence, eventually, progresses to revolution. Or, in the case of Cloud, to a travesty of it. Soon, it’s payback time for Yoshii.

Someone in the online forum group finds Yoshii’s new address and they decide to come for him. This includes Yoshii’s former disgruntled boss, and a squad of unhappy suppliers and buyers. They’re both clownish and malevolent as they close in on Yoshii’s rural enclave like a zombie swarm.

Most of the last half of the movie is a prolonged siege drama, a shoot-out and lethal game of cat and mouse in the woods. The attackers aren’t smart — one wears a mask to hide his face but leaves the logo of his company on his jacket — but they’re too fanatically sadistic to be comic.

The violence is carefully orchestrated. There are plot turns, double crosses and, appropriately for the online world, threats of live streaming torture and echoes of video battle games. But there’s at least a half-hour too much of it. Following the film’s chillingly restrained first half, it feels like a big splat of excess.

Cloud. Directed and written by Kioyshi Kurosawa. Starring Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, and Masataka Kubota. In select theatres nationwide on July 18 with further dates to be announced through the summer.