Have you ever found your way onto storage locker social media? There’s a whole subsection of the internet dedicated to storage auctions, where companies foreclose on lockers and sell them sight unseen to internet streamers. At first, these videos are addictive, pulling us in with the promise of unseen treasures. But the more time you spend with this content, the harder it is to ignore the personal hardships (death, bankruptcy) that allow these units to be sold in the first place. And if this tension between intrigue and exploitation speaks to you, then you might just be the intended audience for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film, Cloud.
As a filmmaker, Kurosawa has spent his career prophesying a very specific type of apocalypse, one where humanity does not realize it has passed the point of no return until it is far too late. Cloud may feel very different from films like Cure or Pulse, but scratch even a little at the surface and Cloud fits neatly into the director’s apocalyptic oeuvre.
When Yoshii (Masaki Suda) isn’t at work, he’s in front of his computer, tracking marketplace trends and prowling for low-cost items to resell online. Yoshii is quick to tell others that reselling is just luck, but there’s no denying he’s good at it, combining attractive photography and buzzy keywords to move product at a considerable margin. Plus, as long as the money is coming in, Yoshii still has the affection of Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), his longtime girlfriend who dreams of a higher standard of living.
So it makes sense that Yoshii would eventually choose to try his hand at reselling fulltime. He leases a bigger home in the countryside and even hires an assistant, recruiting twentysomething townie Sano (Daiken Okudaira) to help him scale up his service. But the more ambitious Yoshii becomes, the more corners he cuts, and soon there are entire forums dedicated to discovering Yoshii’s true identity. It isn’t long before a group of people take it upon themselves to seek vengeance upon Yoshii for his perceived slights and subpar goods.
Kurosawa is no stranger to a slow burn. Still, even by his standards, Cloud takes a while to put its cards on the table. The film spends its first hour meticulously positioning Yoshii as a harmless denizen of the modern internet, using his insight into cultural trends to help him gamble on marketplace items. But play the movie back in your mind during the closing credits and it’s easy to understand why Kurosawa spends so long laying the groundwork. Cloud has a lot to say about parasocial relationships and the soulless capitalism of internet resellers, and the devil – perhaps quite literally – is in the details.
As Yoshii, Ruda does well to downplay any overt rudeness in favor of a kind of absent selfishness. Yoshii means well enough in how he moves through the world. He seems sincere in his love of his girlfriend, and if he’s a bit brusque in his negotiations with creators, it’s only in service to his instincts for zero-sum negotiations. But the more we mull over his actions, the more we understand the butterfly effect his actions have on others.
Several times in the film, we are treated to a lengthy scroll of Yoshii’s negative marketplace reviews. When men finally come seeking their revenge, each subpar transaction or social microaggression hardens into an overwhelming feeling of hatred. Cloud’s greatest accomplishment is encouraging its audience to understand, at least a little, how Yoshii’s actions can be strung together to a streaming death sentence.
One man, his former boss, was embarrassed to have his offerings of mentorship and friendship rebuffed. Another, a fellow reseller and a close friend, has always secretly hated Yoshii, and nurtures a grudge against him for refusing to back a recent investment. No matter their relationship, however, each man is the tip of the iceberg, showing how online tension can escalate to real-world violence. Even Yoshii is stunned that the small nature of his slights could lead to such violent outcomes, asking them if he was “really that bad” when backed into a corner. To him, none of these slights are even worth remembering.
There’s more on the film’s mind than just revenge. Kurosawa is smart to structure his film around internet resellers – people who insert themselves between objects of value and their intended audiences. Yoshii makes a living by buying cheap and marking up, and at least one of the men who chooses to confront him sold his inventory for far less than it was worth out of necessity. Cloud initially frames these actions as a capitalist success story – Yoshii gambled on an item of questionable value and came out ahead in the end – before reminding us that men like Yoshii serve no real purpose in society other than to extract wealth.
The film's most interesting character is Sano, the twentysomething that Yoshii hires to help manage his inventory. As the film unfolds, it is revealed that Sano has strong ties to an unseen crime syndicate, and that he chooses to spend the next phase of his career learning how to make money from nothing at the feet of Yoshii. When his mentor is kidnapped, Sano also cashes in a few favors to launch a bloody rescue campaign. But does Sano represent the real-life monsters who attach themselves to popular online grifters? Or is he a demon sitting on Yoshii’s shoulders? Kurosawa says yes to both, asking audiences to weigh Yoshii's complicity every time Sano pulls the trigger.
Cloud culminates in what amounts to an extended gunfight – including one of the more realistic executions ever committed to film – but the film keeps one foot solidly in the purgatorial horrors of Kurosawa's earlier works. That makes this film a fascinating exercise in genre for the septuagenarian filmmakerL both a departure from and a continuation of his prophecies that the internet will be our downfall. The opacity of the film may prevent it from being an upper-echelon Kurosawa, but there’s still plenty worth chewing on in the director’s latest. Yoshii finds nothing more than capitalism and cruelty online, and the slow build of Cloud makes it clear that the road to hell is paved with good discounts. [3.5/5]
