By Matthew Moorcroft

Strong Recommendation

• Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
• Starring Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira, Amane Okayama
• Not Rated

Kiyoshi Kurosawa really doesn’t like the internet. As far back as the late 90s Kuorsawa has tapped into his own personal fears about what it’s like to live away from people, attached to too much technology and not enough attachment to the people around us. And while he hasn’t really discussed that much recently, it still permeates much of his work and his general public perception to the point it feels inevitable that his latest, Cloud, would return to that same roadhouse.

And while Cloud isn’t exactly the same as before, with two decades worth of internet evolution and public knowledge of how it function having changed how Kurosawa interacts with it, it still has those same primal, fundamental fears intact. Which is to say that going online is probably, in a lot of ways, just as scary as going outside. You aren’t running away from reality so much as just changing how you interact with said reality. Inevitably that reality will find you, and it will be just as ugly as before – maybe even more so, if people on the internet are any indication.

Told through the lens of a scalper who gets in too deep, Cloud is as slow of a burn as you can imagine, caring more to simmer then to boil over. And even when that hotpot explodes, it’s less of a massive fallout and more of a loud kettle screaming obnoxiously – sure, it’s hot and boiling over, but everybody is fumbling around in the living room trying to pause Netflix so they can go deal with it before it gets louder. That scalper himself, played to immense degrees of purposeful unlikability by Masaki Suda, is more interested in turning a profit then anything else. The bottom line is everything, capital is all that matters at the end of the day and shift, no matter who he rips off or scams.

The real great stuff in Cloud is all in how Kurosawa frames the act of buying and selling as something to fear in of itself. The hum of the computer as our lead stares into the void of the internet, just waiting for one of them, any of them, to possibly sell so a profit can be turned. And while there is an initial high to be gained from it when it does go well, you can’t have it go on forever. Eventually you will anger somebody, especially if that person is equally as online as you, just not in the way you want.

But it’s all in service… what exactly? Cloud doesn’t really give any easy answers if it even wants to, instead presenting a world where nothing really matters, nothing exists, everyone is fake, and everybody has a persona they have to abide by no matter how ridiculous it might be. Even in the world outside of the internet, where somebody is hired to be the assistant of our lead scalper in a desperate attempt to seem legitimate, people aren’t what they seem as that assistant turns out to have shady connections that make him more dangerous then you would think. It’s this level of uncertainty that follows all of Cloud as a movie and particularly it’s second half which devolves the movie into a comedy of errors involving people who definitely should not be at a shoot out in a shoot out with the yakuza equivalent of John Wick. It’s probably the closest that we will ever get Kiyoshi Kurosawa to ever direct an action movie and that alone is worth the price of admission.

What really ends up sealing that deal about Cloud is that, while it’s themes are mostly “been there, done that” for Kurosawa, it’s so confidently told and directed that it ultimately doesn’t matter. This is his wheelhouse and he is crushing it, the weight of the internet finally giving him ample amounts of material to explore our deep seated fears of what will happen if we give into the capital of online currency. I don’t know if Cloud stands as his best work – he’s made some absolute all timers and Cloud is a little slight in the end, particularly once it moves away from it’s more tense beginnings into sillier territory – but as a return to his roots, it’s more then I could have asked for and certainly worth a watch for anybody who loves his analog fears.