Few directors are as skilled as Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa when it comes to articulating the alienation and paranoia of the digital age. One of his first international breakouts, already decades deep into his career, was 2001’s Pulse, a distressing ghost story about the gradual supernatural invasion of the online world which managed to accurately depict the societal disconnect that technology would cause all the way back in the era of dial-up internet. When this writer saw it for the first time during the COVID lockdown, it could have been easily mistaken for a movie that only just wrapped filming, so eerily prescient in its mixture of techno-horror and social commentary.

The increasingly prolific filmmaker’s 25th effort, Cloud, sees him return to similarly emotionally detached digital terrain, although this time he’s exploring the lack of connection in the online age from a far more grounded perspective – if you can say that about a movie which gradually descends into over-the-top thriller territory by its third act. The film, Japan’s submission for the most recent Best International Film Oscar, more than earns the right to take a sharp left turn into gleefully silly genre mode as it nears its finale, keeping even the most ridiculous parts of the drama fully in-line with its central thesis about the relationships between late-stage capitalism, hustle culture, and social media’s endless desire for a new daily “main character” to torment, all without making anybody on screen easy to empathise with. This is a feature, not a bug, but I suspect it will largely be treated as the latter by those left out in the cold. For me, it only re-emphasised the movie’s dual fascinations with two dehumanising enterprises, bringing both into a bloody collision course which delivers black comedy where the catharsis should be.

Masaki Suda stars as Ryosuke Yoshii, an infamous internet reseller who goes by the name of Ratel, whose reign of terror heightens to the next level when he quits his day job to commit himself to his online shopping scams full time. His typical schemes largely involve trawling through Amazon, looking for the most popular items at any given moment and buying out their full stock, marking up the prices to extortionate amounts when they arrive to take advantage of the demand. Naturally, it’s made him a faceless villain in the eyes of several online communities, with several message board forums dedicated to trying to “doxx” and ascribe various evil characteristics to him; in reality, he’s a boring man largely lacking in the self-awareness that his online footprint has made him public enemy number one. After moving from Tokyo with his girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa) to a rural outpost an hour’s drive away to establish a new centre of business operations, the house quickly gets targeted in a series of random attacks. But are these local kids, as the police claim, or are years of extortionate money-grabbing plans – often involving important necessities like healthcare equipment – catching up with him?

The playful way Kurosawa lays out the exploitation and disillusionment faced by shoppers and workers in the e-commerce era – and the ways that bloodthirsty entrepreneurs are set up to take advantage of both under the guise of “hustle culture” and loose online regulation – is self apparent, with some of the most clear-cut commentary within a filmography that has triggered countless “ending explained” articles. But less discussed is the way this story is also an analysis of a social media landscape which rewards bad behaviour, elevating often faceless figures to “main character” status on their feeds, each ill-thought-through scheme or quote unexpectedly pushed to the top of thousands of accounts whose knives are sharply drawn. Admittedly, Yoshii is the rare “main character” whose history of price-gouging welcomes investigation and scrutiny, but he lacks the self-awareness to understand why he could ever be considered a villain. In the minds of countless forum users, he’s deliberately concocting schemes to get rich and make them miserable – in reality, he’s thinking on his feet, lacking in any foresight as to what the consequences of his actions could be. It’s a very specific form of myopia; a man blinded to the damage he’s causing because he’s not terminally online enough to dig deeper into the communities united in hating him. 

Kurosawa does briefly nod to his earlier work in horror in sequences where Yoshii hears unexpected knocks on the door, and sees indistinct, unwelcome visitors on the street outside, but his protagonist’s flaw is viewing these as mere aberrations. Like many a self-sufficient businessman weaned on the take-no-prisoners tactics of this era, he’s far more disconnected from his public than his online footprint makes it seem. What might frustrate many, however, is that the writer/director sees no need to vilify him further beyond his actions; he is, ultimately, too bland, too goal-oriented, to ever feel like the living embodiment of capitalist evil his detractors peg him as. Perhaps an exploration of this most banal of evils is what Kurosawa was going for, but even on that level, the most remarkable thing about the third act is that the director never allows us to feel catharsis at an awful man getting his comeuppance. Some might feel distanced by this, but for me, it felt like a natural conclusion. Even if we were to get revenge, how is it possible to feel relief when still existing within a system where there are countless other shady businessmen like him, ready to exploit us? 

It makes the third act feel more unpredictable than it might appear on paper, considering a baked-in revenge movie premise that’s ripe for the taking. Kurosawa always avoids the most convenient narrative route, and the overly familiar commentary that might go with it, to guide us down a path that’ll trigger more debate. This might be why, when the current wave of “eat the rich” genre satires finally comes to an end, this morally thorny tale will stand strong as one of the era’s richest.

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Written by Alistair Ryder

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