Is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 'Cloud' the techno thriller for the decade of online desperation?

There are very few directors that can build tension with just the scroll of a mouse or the click of a button, one of which is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. From the Japanese director known best for techno-thriller Pulse and j-horror Cure, Kurosawa's latest techno-thriller Cloud follows a young reseller, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), in his descent into the black market world of merchandising.

The quality and authenticity of the products Yoshii resells are of little importance to him, and yet the final number on his screen is. Kurosawa presents blackmarket dealing as a gambling addiction inviting audiences to watch Yoshii’s dead eyed glance as he watches the products on the screen. When the anonymous item is desirable Yoshii’s screen quickly fills with red 'sold out' labels, but his products don’t always sell and as his reputation as a dodgy dealer spreads online the obsessive reseller is left desperately chasing his purchasing high.

Cloud stands in bleak contrast with modern media's obsession with scammers, gamblers and thieves (Uncut Gems, Bling Ring) partly because despite exploring greed, Kurosawa paints a very bland portrait. What makes Cloud different from these financially motivated thrillers is its lack of aspirational opulence. Where Uncut Gems has gaudy diamond encrusted accessories and Spring Breakers has bags of cash, Cloud only offers an unending number of boxes that are loaded onto Yoshii’s shelves unopened and return to his car and onto the courier in the same condition. Their value is deemed by what the market for them is making them Schrodinger’s boxes, an infinite number of unseen goods that matter only because of the demand of unseen buyers.

It is never entirely apparent whether Yoshii wishes for wealth in any extreme sense. He clearly wishes for more than the exhaustion of the daily grind of the average worker with nothing to show for it. A crime that we are all guilty of. Yoshii has some assemblage of aspirations beyond being a factory worker, but he doesn’t yearn for material wealth. His growing addiction to reselling goods seems instead to be his attempt at gaming life. Yoshii’s downfall is not particularly unique or special. Nor is there anything extraordinary about Yoshii’s desires or ambitions, which is very much in keeping with Kurosawa’s characters. Alongside an electronic hum that haunts much of his filmography, Kurosawa remains grounded in the mundane, even while descending into a protagonist's personal hell.

Kurossawa’s latest techno-thriller Cloud is arguably two movies in one. The first act is a slow yet engaging crawl as Yoshii finds himself quickly entangled in the sticky matter of the dark web, while the second is a brutal shootout sequence in which the people Yoshii has disregarded in his financial climb seek their revenge. The resell market Cloud depicts, alludes to the vacuous desperation of our online worlds, bringing strangers together in a chaotic bid for revenge, apt for these digital outlaws. Cloud is Kurosawa's latest film to critique digital society, demonstrating how the internet casts a bleak shadow over our reality, hollowing out its key players and leaving them stuck in a world where a win means more than life itself.

Cloud is released on 25 April 2025

picturehouses.com