Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies of work from a veteran filmmaker, one as dedicated to remixing his own work in late auteur style as he is retaining the fresh experimental bent of a much younger director. Martin Scorsese and Hong Sang-soo may be the only other filmmakers who have also been able to accomplish a similar feat this far into their careers. While Kurosawa’s medium-length film Chime, which made the rounds earlier this year, took its cues from his turn-of-the-century masterpieces Cure and Pulse, distilling them both into a pure expression of unnameable yet deeply resonant dread, Cloud seems like a spiritual sequel to his 2016 film Creepy, an exploration of the everyday evil next door that begins as one kind of suspense thriller before moving into the territory of a violent genre film. In Creepy, the monster under investigation is the family and neighborly relations; in Cloud, the villain is just as archetypal: capitalism itself.
Masaki Suda stars as Yoshii, a young man who moonlights from his factory job as a reseller on the internet. He finds products that are underpriced and buys them up, reselling them at something more approaching their true value. Sometimes, this involves simply picking up stuff on sale at Amazon, or it requires persuading mom-and-pop manufacturers to let their goods go at a significant discount; and at still other times, it involves dealing in counterfeits and bootlegs. Nothing he does — aside from selling fakes, though he seems to maintain deniability about their authenticity — is particularly illegal, but that doesn’t stop the people who fail to profit as much as he does or who are stuck with bootleg merchandise from hating him for it.
As Yoshii’s business grows, he quits his factory job, much to the dismay of his boss. He also turns down an investment opportunity from a classmate, and he rents a house in the country for him and his girlfriend. All of these decisions will come back to haunt him. Not literally, as in one of Kurosawa’s ghost stories, and despite the first half of the film’s nods toward the uncanny, but physically, as Yoshii becomes the target of increasingly threatening violent reprisals. As the film makes its genre shift in the final third, it morphs into a kind of hitman thriller, like a Kurosawa version of a Baby Assassins movie, except where the action is just as black and deadpan as the humor, and it’s (almost) only boys shooting the guns.
Kurosawa’s trick is that all of this blends together because of his mastery of visual filmmaking: framing, camera movement, editing. No director has ever been better at expressing the uncanny, the unseen, and the unknowable than Kurosawa. With Chime, those unknowns are intangible, a kind of floating madness expressive of the malaise of modern life. In Cloud, despite the ephemeral title — a pointed contrast with the Internet relations that become all too real — the madness is resolutely physical: violations of the home and the body perpetrated by the villains, themselves motivated by the material consequences of Yoshii’s actions, or the result of his privileging his material well-being above his friends’ and colleagues’ emotional concerns. One might regard the explicability of Cloud as a drawback, a lesser statement than the more mysterious, and thus more infinitely interpretable, Chime. But seen together, they’re really two halves of the same excellent whole, two expressions of the same dread Kurosawa has spent the last 30 years exploring as deftly and with as much precision as anyone ever has.
