Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).
After four decades spent scaring moviegoers through all manner of supernatural subject matter, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has, with Cloud (2024), taken to exploring the psychological effects of a more everyday evil: capitalism. In this follow-up to his medium-length psychodrama Chime earlier this year (a film as cryptic and tantalizingly elusive as anything he’s recently endeavored), Kurosawa reconfigures a number of themes and ideas that have animated his long-running career in the horror genre, namely loneliness and the ways in which the internet can stoke malevolent forces from both within and without. Kurosawa has described Cloud as an “action film," a simultaneously apt and insufficient characterization for a movie operating on a slippery dialectical wavelength. It’s this cerebral approach to genre, rooted in the quotidian rather than otherworldly, that has led critics like Chris Fujiwara to place Kurosawa not alongside his contemporaries in the J-horror movement, but in the lineage of Hollywood studio practitioners like Jacques Tourneur—a comparison neatly reinforced through Cloud’s economical mix of social drama and technophobic intrigue.
Cloud stars Masaki Suda as Yoshii, an internet reseller who buys consumer goods at a discount and hawks them online for a profit. Sometimes the items are legitimate, other times not so much, and it’s lucrative enough a hustle for Yoshii to one day up and quit his day job at a clothing factory, turning down a promotion from his perceptibly perplexed boss (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa). In the words of a local supplier, Yoshii “operates on impulse and instinct.” It’s a cold and callous approach that clearly pays dividends—but at what cost? So confident is Yoshii in this self-sustaining racket that he even rejects an offer from an old school friend (Masataka Kubota) to invest in an upstart auction platform, a seemingly incidental decision that, like everything in this quietly unfolding film, begins to take on new weight when Yoshii moves with his girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa) to the countryside, where he can stock more goods and retreat from those putting undue pressure on his personal and professional pursuits.
It’s here where incidents that Yoshii could once brush off as negligible or coincidental when living in the city—such as an unsettling encounter in a park or an odd occurrence on a bus—become increasingly threatening. Soon after settling in, a piece of a car engine comes crashing through Yoshii’s bedroom window, followed by the arrival of ominous figures around the property. Meanwhile, with the help of a new assistant (Daiken Okudaira), Yoshii continues to grow his business to the point of attracting the notice of the local authorities, who believe that this mysterious outsider is trafficking in counterfeit goods. Turns out these events are not unrelated but the result of a group of Yoshii’s customers, as well as his former boss and classmate, banding together to seek revenge on the man whom they believe either scammed or slighted them—a revelation that most directors would use as a device to clarify the film’s moral position and be done with it. Instead, in a bold pivot, Cloud shifts from Yoshii’s perspective to that of his victims, who have connected through chatrooms to plot an elaborate kidnapping scheme that then plays out in detail over the course of the film’s second half.
In a director’s statement accompanying the film’s premiere in Venice, Kurosawa compares this online mob mentality to the mindset that leads to war. While I’ve never considered Kurosawa an explicitly political filmmaker, the capriciousness of Cloud is a perfect example of cinema’s ability to reflect the current cultural climate, something that could likewise be said about the Y2K paranoia of the director’s turn-of-the-millennium classic, Pulse (2001), as well as the modern day sociological malaise depicted in Charisma (1999) and Tokyo Sonata (2008), this film’s most notable precursors. In both, notions of class and individuality are tested in group settings and by culturally specific social hierarchies. Here, we witness that dynamic in microcosm: the throng that descends on Yoshii is diverse to the point of instability. Not only do the characters come from different backgrounds, but they also have slightly different grievances with Yoshii, resulting in, among other things, disagreements as to how and in what manner he should be punished. In the end, they’re united solely by unchecked bloodlust, which, in typical Kurosawa fashion, is dramatized to the point of abstraction. How exactly Yoshii comes to grips with these events and to what extent this world is able to sustain itself in the face of such rampant immorality are ultimately kept just outside the frame. As is often the case in Kurosawa’s work, the closer you look, the further things slip from comprehension.
While in Venice, I sat down with Kurosawa to discuss Cloud’s origins and how its political, thematic, and structural particulars revealed themselves naturally and unexpectedly through the process of making the film.
Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Before we talk about the themes or plot of the film, I thought we could discuss the idea of making what you’ve described as an action film. What prompted you to want to explore the genre now?
KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: I’ve always had a desire to make action movies, but not normal action movies, even though I love many normal action movies. It’s very easy to make an action movie out of a yakuza, police, military, or mafia story, but what I wanted to focus on here was the ordinary people, who don’t normally live with violence in their daily life. It was challenging: how can I bring these ordinary people into a world of action and violence, and put them in a kind of extreme situation where they might be threatened or killed?
NOTEBOOK: Your films have often dealt with technology and, on occasion, with the internet, as in Pulse. I’m curious what draws you to technological themes and if you consider this film a continuation of the ideas you started exploring in the late ’90s and early 2000s?
KUROSAWA: I’ve never really considered technology one of my main themes. I’m not very interested in whatever the new technology is at any moment. For Cloud I was more interested in focusing on something we have inside of us—say, an insecurity that we can then amplify or multiply through the potentialities of the internet. The internet has many potentials, and one of them is this ability to amplify what’s inside us.
NOTEBOOK: Was there a particular situation or real-life incident that inspired the story?
KUROSAWA: Yes, I actually did take the idea from an instance some years ago in Japan in which four or five guys on the internet banded together to kill a guy that they had a problem with, but who they didn’t know in real life, similar to what you see in the film.
Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: In your director’s statement you say that, in the film, “profiteering and revenge overlap and amplify, eventually setting violent acts into motion, and before you know it, there’s no turning back. In a sense, this might also be how modern-day wars come into being.” I’m curious at what point you began to think of this story as something that could be read politically, or at least from multiple angles?
KUROSAWA: War wasn’t actually a theme I thought I wanted to explore when I first started making this film. But when I began to develop the story I started to realize that it had aspects to it that related to war. In the film it’s a series of very small frustrations felt by the characters that leads to their hate and to the eruption of violence, gunfire, and even murder. To me it’s this psychological aspect that most relates to war, because wars most often deal with different nations or cultures, but it’s individual, unrelated people who have to do the shooting and the killing. There’s no personal connection between them. It’s this sort of psychology that links the two ideas.
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about the cultural dynamic in the film as it relates to the division between the city and the country? It seems to define both the shape of the narrative and how the characters interact with one another.
KUROSAWA: There was no big intention on my part in the decision to set the film between the city and the country. It’s not a theme or a metaphor or anything like that. But I do have a friend who’s a reseller, and he told me that because of all the merchandise that resellers tend to have, they need to have a lot of space to store the products. In Tokyo it’s difficult to have a big enough space to store much of anything. So that’s why I decided to have Yoshii move from the city to the countryside.
However, to my surprise, Cloud did reveal something very interesting to me about the character only after finishing the film, in a way that only cinema can. In Tokyo, Yoshii is basically alone. There’s an emptiness to him. But we maybe couldn’t see his state of mind, or his loneliness or problems when he was in Tokyo. But in the countryside, with its very isolated spaces, his state of mind is very highlighted. This wasn’t intentional, but it came as a result of this decision to move the character from the city to the country.
Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: The film also seems to be split between the sole perspective of Yoshii in its first half and the more collective perspective of the mob in the second half. Was this something you conceptualized while writing, or was it developed once you were on set and able to work out scenes with the actors and your cinematographer?
KUROSAWA: What you just mentioned is interesting. I never thought about that aspect of it, moving from one perspective to many perspectives. For me that was simply part of making an action movie: I not only needed a protagonist, Yoshii, but I also needed enemies for Yoshii, and they mostly arrive as the second half of the film begins—though you do get hints of a few of them before that. There’s a scene at the midway point of the film where a character named Miyake is introduced living in an internet cafe. And this moment comes suddenly. Miyake has never been seen before this, but many characters soon start to be introduced around Miyake, and it begins with this scene. So you’re right that in both cases—city versus country, individual versus collective—these dynamics helped change and shape the film’s structure.
NOTEBOOK: The last scene seems to hint at or even set up an entirely new story. Is this a world you want to return to?
KUROSAWA: I’ll admit that if I could make a sequel to this story it could be very interesting. But no, this is a purposefully open-ended conclusion. I leave it to the viewer’s imagination to imagine how or where the story could go. And this is not something unique to Cloud. You could say that all my movies are similarly open-ended. Things are usually not clarified; there aren’t clean endings. I let the viewer imagine and interpret as they please.