Cloud By Ethan Miguel Viera

*Spoilers ahead for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud*

For as long as I can remember, movies have meant everything to me. They are the reason I became an actor, and they are also the reason some people avoid me at parties. In middle school I became an avid collector of Blu-rays, as well as their more expensive counterpart, Steelbooks. Steelbooks are essentially a Blu-ray disc wrapped in a metal case with unique cover art. I was obsessed. When I was in middle school a special edition of Drive was released in an amazing Steelbook case that I just had to have. I rushed to the nearest Best Buy with my dad, and lo and behold, it was completely sold out. I searched for it online, only to find it sold out everywhere but one place. The Steelbook was available on eBay for $150. It retailed for around $35.

This was my first encounter with resellers, more commonly known as scalpers. I continued to run into scalpers anytime I tried getting something new that would be in demand. From Steelbooks to concert tickets to the PS5, scalpers are now commonplace not only in American culture, but around the world. I saw Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s brand new film Cloud on its opening weekend, followed by a live Q&A with Kurosawa and Indiewire film critic David Ehrlich. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a Japanese director who has given us masterpieces such as Cure, Pulse, and Tokyo Sonata. With Cloud, Kurosawa takes a departure from his normal tendencies as a filmmaker as he tries to tackle a new genre: action. Cloud is an action movie as only Kurosawa could make it. Kurosawa focuses first on building a rich atmosphere and palpable tension, saving any physical violence for the very end of the movie. Cloud operates more like a psychological thriller or horror movie than an action movie until the final extended shootout. The film follows Yoshii, a factory worker who doubles as an online reseller under the pseudonym “Ratel.” At first I thought that a reseller was such an odd choice of occupation for the protagonist of the film. Not a job that is all that exhilarating, especially for an action movie. But as the film went on I realized that a reseller was the perfect choice for the other topic Kurosawa was trying to tackle: our modern-day disconnected society. It is a job that can only exist, in the way it is depicted, in a world defined by the internet.

You see, Yoshii is struggling. He isn’t satisfied with his current factory job, his reselling business isn’t as profitable as he hoped, and he’s in a surface-level, materialistic relationship. With Yoshii being a reseller, it frames the story through the lens of a job that is highly reflective of the pitfalls of modern society. Someone buys out the stock of an in-demand item, they go and resell it at an exponentially higher price than they bought it for, and they then use the money earned on sales to spend on the next big fad, setting their profits back to barely a surviving wage. Never do the buyer or seller see each other, and not once does either party really benefit. Both victims and aggravators of a system built without them in mind.

Yoshii is money-driven, as are most characters in this film. Our very first introduction to Yoshii is him coldly ripping off an older couple for their sketchy medical devices and then reselling them online at a much higher price. In one of the first scenes where we meet Akiko, Yoshii’s girlfriend, she says that she is mostly interested in his credit cards. And Yoshii’s only other “friend” is another struggling reseller who is only really looking for investments. Yoshii has had enough of his factory job and decides to use his earnings from the medical equipment to move to a house in the countryside outside of Tokyo with Akiko. He quits his job at the factory and decides to shift to reselling full-time, using his new place as storage for his next sale: fake designer bags. He has a nice setup and even affords himself a new assistant.

Unfortunately for Yoshii, this move isn’t going as well as he’d hoped. He’s struggling to sell the bags, a mysterious car is harassing the house at night, and Akiko is bored, dissatisfied, and frustrated—so much so that she attempts to seduce Yoshii’s assistant. He refuses out of a seemingly strange loyalty to Yoshii. Akiko decides to pack her bags and leave Yoshii for good. Yoshii isn’t too concerned; he’s more distracted by the unsettling encounters and saving his failing online business. He’s also convinced she’ll return.

The perpetrators of the late-night drive-bys are revealed to be a group of men from an online forum similar to 4chan, dedicated solely to the downfall of “Ratel.” Each person has been scammed or ripped off in one way or another by Yoshii, and they have finally found his new address. And they plan to do something about it.

This is where the film takes a sharp turn. What follows is an extended action sequence leading up to the very end of the film. Yoshii’s house is broken into, he’s chased throughout the woods, and eventually he’s captured by the men from the online group. The men are revealed to be the husband from the older couple that had the medical equipment, Yoshii’s boss at the factory, Yoshii’s reseller “friend,” and a newcomer, Miyake. Miyake purchased some of the fake designer bags Yoshii had put up for sale and tried to resell them himself. When one of the new buyers figured out they were fake bags, he found Miyake at an internet café and beat him, pushing Miyake to join the online group. They tie Yoshii up in an abandoned warehouse and plan to burn him alive on livestream. Without giving too much away, Yoshii does manage to escape the situation with help from an unforeseen ally. It is in these final 30–45 minutes of the film that Kurosawa so expertly dissects our society. Each of the aggressors is a victim of an unkind world juggling pent-up resentments and anger, with no place to put them but anonymously online. An attempt to escape, to become an anonymous person and let everything out. But what happens when people can’t take it anymore? They move to more extreme means. What may seem somewhat unbelievable in Cloud is very much something that can and has happened in our world. Kurosawa seems to suggest that this is exactly where we are heading. With our world becoming more and more disconnected at a time when we’ve never had more access to connection, it seems darkness is the only path Kurosawa sees ahead of us. After Yoshii guns down aggressor after aggressor in order to escape, his first thought is to check if his latest items sold. When Akiko does eventually come back at the very end of the film, it is only to steal Yoshii’s money. But Yoshii doesn’t care; he hugs her regardless, purely out of relief that someone offers even the slightest bit of human connection.

It seems Yoshii is built for this new world; he is cold and self-aware. He goes to Akiko fully aware she is using him because that’s the only connection he thinks he deserves, and he is content with that. He is the type of person that can survive in this modern era of a profit-based circular lifestyle. And in the final moments of the film, as he drives off with a vortex of different-colored clouds in front of him, he mutters, “So this is how you’re going to hell,” his humanity an afterthought to his survival in this world. I think Kurosawa believes that the only path left for us, in this world governed by the internet, is one that asks us to shed most of what makes us human. To take one step further to becoming a part of the cloud.