TIFF '24: Kiyoshi Kurosawa delivers a new nightmare in "Cloud"

by Cláudio Alves

CLOUD

What if, one day, you realized everyone in the world hates you? What's more, everyone wants you dead. That's the sort of situation you might expect to encounter in the world of dreams and night terrors, one's innermost anxieties synthesized for a restless slumber. It's also the nightmarish scenario Kiyoshi Kurosawa suggests in his latest shocker, a work of stress cinema supreme with many surprises in store, playing like a descent into hell. It's also Japan's official submission for the Best International Film Oscar race, as bizarre as that might seem. It's a bold choice, alright. Maybe not the best from a strategic standpoint, but a true celebration of Japanese film excellence. 

And one thing's for sure – there's no other director like Kiyoshi Kurosawa out there, and no film like Cloud either…

Ryosuke Yoshii is a common man in this day and age of late capitalism. While maintaining a factory job in Tokyo, he also makes extra money on the side by purchasing goods and reselling them for inflated prices online. It's a grift that consumes his waking hours, the greedy promises of the flashing computer screen begging for his constant care. That he has a girlfriend and a boss who holds him in high esteem seems inconsequential to the young man, for there's no amount of love that can replicate the thrill of the gamble. Though not zombified as if he were in some preachy moral tale against the internet age, Yoshii is still half-deadened.

Kurosawa doesn't belabor the point nor does he direct Masaki Suda toward stylization, keeping things mundane and grounded. Indeed, much of Cloud's first hour may feel aimless at a glance, documenting the reseller's quotidian with a dispassionate elegance. But when you least expect it, a touch of the eerie will manifest, sometimes through strictly formal means. It's the shifting light at an old schoolmate's apartment and the shadow that crosses the couple while on the bus. It's an unexpected nocturnal visit and a wire trap ready to cut Yoshii at his knees in the middle of the road. It's the vitreous stare of another man just as empty as the one online buyers call Ratel.

That pseudonym leaves folks' lips like a curse, and even before madness erupts, its sound rattles the brain with promises of wickedness. The director is playing a familiar game to those who've followed his career, twisting mundanity into a broken thing that seeps into the viewer's spirit long before they've realized what's afoot. But it's not just the world that's wrong. It's the people, too. Yoshii may be a shell, but at least he's one the camera perceives with some modicum of understanding. One can't say the same about the remaining cast of characters. We might regard them as Yoshii does, undeserving of a second glance, but they're capable of the unimaginable.

Inklings of rancor or avarice, old resentments or plain greed start rationally enough, with abrupt cuts expanding the narrative's reach beyond its hollowed out leading man and into the lives of those most affected by his deeds. However, along the way, rage turns to madness and that lunacy spreads like a mind virus that bends Cloud out of shape, out of genre. Drama gives into thriller filmmaking, notes of horror in faces obscured behind thick glass and chases through the woods, before the whole thing dives into the nastiest variants of action cinema. Before you know it, Yoshii is being hunted down and threatened with live-streamed immolation.

Though the behavior of those practicing it is alien, violence, as depicted by Kurosawa, is a straightforward affair, visceral to the nth degree, and queasy to observe. Yet, we laugh and applaud, and beg for more, enthralled by the heights of human brutality. It might be a matter of instinct, a bloodthirst within us all that such follies awaken. Perhaps the public watching the nightmare of Cloud wouldn't be innocent if they felt the impulse for carnage. Are we so rational that we are above such animalistic urges and demonic wants? After all, aren't we all already infected by the evils that curdle within the narrative way before Kurosawa decided to stage a pitch-black action comedy?

Money is the thing and the seed of chaos. It's a portal to hell that's impossible to return from once you've crossed over. Even Yoshii seems to realize it at the end of his tale, driving into an abstraction of rusted blood and sunset gold. At his side, Mephistopheles plays the part of the guardian angel with a gun in his hand. He's the only one Yoshii has left, eager to protect Ratel as he destroys more lives and incurs more mobs out for his head. In its iconography, it looks like a happy ending but feels anything but. The fabric of society destroyed, humanity lost, there's nothing left. Well, nothing except looking at items being sold out and the bank account numbers rising and falling forever more.