Cloud

An ethically dubious reseller has serious buyer’s remorse in Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s thriller.

“Winning streaks don’t last forever.”

Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is a professional reseller:  that is to say, he buys items wholesale for peanuts and resells them at a considerable markup. His lack of quality control, however, has made unpopular with a lot of clients, and his unscrupulous methods have made him enemies in his suppliers. He, however, doesn’t really take notice and after a particularly good wave of success decides to leave his Tokyo apartment and move in to the country with his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa). He hires an assistant (Daiken Okudaira), who learns that online is a growing group of people dedicated to doxxing Yoshii and making him pay.

Cloud is the sort of straightforward thriller I haven’t seen in a very long time.  So much so that I struggle to write anything particularly new or interesting about it. The set-up is almost refreshingly simple, and things progress naturally, accelerating at a rate I think a lot of modern thrillers don’t do anymore. Kurasawa has decades of experience with thrillers and horrors, and it shows in the way he chooses to pace this story. There were no points at which I was checking my watch.

By splitting the film into two distinct halves – the set up, and the mob coming to take their revenge – and each has their own unique form of tension. The first half uses Masaki Suda heavily, letting the audience get to know him, for better or worse. Suda does a lot of good work here, allowing the audience to make up their mind about him, sprinkling in enough good and bad traits to make him feel human, and not just an archetype. The second half goes a bit more broad, with Suda just trying to survive, and the mob (who are, as a unit, a bit less interesting) as the main force of antagonism.

The film operates on its own weird heightened reality. It’s not impossible, sure, but it seems strikingly unlikely that Yoshii’s activities are so heinous as to have created an actual murderous mob. But a lot of the story  hinges on this, and once you suspend your disbelief enough, the home invasion/kidnapping portion of the film actually works very well. Ultimately, Cloud is a bit of a morality tale, a fable as classic in its delivery as it is not in its content. It is a typical tale of a morally corrupt individual getting what’s coming, with some modern twists. This lets the film feel both new and timeless at the same time, if occasionally a bit samey. But damn, did Yoshii get lucky hiring Sano.

While it might stretch credulity here and there, Cloud nevertheless remains an effective revenge thriller, bolstered by a very strong cast.

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Cloud (2024)
Also known as: クラウド
Japanese

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Writer: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

CAST

Masaki Suda – Ryosuke
Kotone Furukawa – Akiko
Daiken Okudaira – Sano
Amane Okayama – Miyake
Yoshiyoshi Arakawa – Takmoto
Masataka Kubota – Muraoka