Cloud

Few filmmakers have both captured the moment and shown remarkable prescience about what’s to come as the Japanese auteur, whose all-time-great 2001 horror movie Pulse saw spirits entering the world of the living through the internet. In addition to showing rare insight about the porous borders between our world and the one on the other side of our screens, Pulse features one of the most terrifying sequences ever put on film. The writer/director’s latest, Cloud, further explores the ways in which our online lives exist beyond the internet by following that most reviled of vocations: the lowly scalper.

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Anyone who’s ever had their dreams of seeing Taylor Swift or buying a Labubu dashed by the secondary market will have a hard time warming to Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who sells his wares at a steep markup under the handle Ratel. That’s another name for the honey badger, whose fierce, meme-worthy disposition couldn’t be less like Yoshii’s. Quiet and diffident, he does everything he can to bifurcate his actual self from his anonymous web persona. Unfortunately for him, a large number of his customers are as skilled at online sleuthing as they are unhappy with their knockoff handbags.

Resellers aren’t exactly serving the public good, but worse vocations have made for sympathetic protagonists. Kurosawa doesn’t much care whether we like Yoshii, only whether we consider him an intriguing avatar of a particular subset of society: disaffected workers who see no path toward upward mobility beyond the one they desperately eke out for themselves. Yoshii isn’t admirable, but in our 21st-century capitalist society he is inevitable. In other words: don’t hate the player, hate the game.

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Though best known for both Pulse and fellow horror exemplar Cure (1997), Kurosawa has a varied filmography of nearly 30 movies that have never been constrained by genre. Horror is where he excels, though, and a few choice moments in Cloud demonstrate that yet again. This isn’t a horror movie, but Kurosawa is such a master of the genre that he can’t help throwing in a few early flourishes: all diegetic sound going silent when a stranger appears behind Yoshii and his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) on the bus, the lights flickering on and off as Yoshii notices someone outside his apartment one night.

Yoshii isn’t admirable, but in our 21st-century capitalist society he is inevitable.

By the time we realize where all this is headed — namely, toward a group of unsatisfied customers uncovering Yoshii’s identity and banding together to assassinate him — you may have a raised eyebrow rather than a quickening pulse. Though he seems to know how silly Cloud’s second half is, Kurosawa doesn’t always lean into that silliness enough for us to feel like we’re in on the joke. Those who believe truth is stranger than fiction may start to wonder whether this was inspired by true events, as that would almost make more sense than Kurosawa dreaming it up himself.

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And yet dream it up he did, and clearly for a reason. There’s a difference between technology making our lives easier and making them better, a distinction Kurosawa zeroes in on with far more precision than the mob loosed upon our (anti)hero does. There’s a collective sense of “...now what?” among the inept, would-be assassins once they find Yoshii, a collision between plans made online behind usernames and deeds carried out in real life with (some of) their faces exposed. “Is life easy now?” a fellow scalper asks Yoshii when recalling the get-rich-quick motivation that first got them into this world. He doesn’t answer, nor does he need to.