Venice 2024 review: Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Cloud promises us a world where everybody can, and will, effortlessly turn into a murderer just to protect or obtain a few scraps of money.”

After a four-year hiatus since Wife of a Spy – uncommon in his career – Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns with no less than two feature films, plus one medium-length one (Chime, presented at the Berlinale at the beginning of the year). Cloud is the first of the two to come out of Japan, where the other one, Serpent’s Path, has already been released ahead of its international premiere at the San Sebastian festival later this year. Starting with its title and its initial letter, Cloud extends what is now a trilogy about madness in its purest form, and its dissemination through mankind like a disease; Cure (1999) and Creepy (2016) were the first two episodes of this ‘Crazy’ trilogy. Both of them had at their center a human agent actively responsible for the proliferation of psychosis and violence, which is not the case anymore in Cloud. Nowadays, Kurosawa tells us, the combination of late-stage capitalism and misuse of Internet resources is sufficient to tear down the fabric of society, even without anyone explicitly aiming for this goal.

The narrative structure of Cloud is quite similar to that of Creepy, with a first hour displaying existences as normal as they get, before all hell unexpectedly breaks loose in the second half. Yoshii, the main character (portrayed by Masaki Suda), juggles between the three components of his life: his relationship, his day job at the factory, and his personal business as an online reseller of all sorts of goods. Even though his girlfriend and his boss hold him in high esteem, Yoshii only has eyes for the latter activity, which is evidenced by the opening sequence of the film, the first of many instances that hammer down this fact. Yoshii becomes one with the computer screen that displays his latest batch of products, bought for next to nothing and on which he makes a shockingly high margin. His lack of interest in anything apart from his merchandise and his profits makes him look more like a personification of capitalist schemes – the color of his shirt in the first scene even matches the boxes he uses for storage and delivery – than a real human being.

Yoshii is almost an “agent” in the Matrix sense, and his lack of human emotions will make him oblivious to the damage he causes until the very last scene (also similar to the ending of Creepy, with the same kind of primal scream erupting as a sign of humanity gushing back in too late). But here is the trick: Yoshii is not the only bad guy of the story, as there are only bad guys in our society as Kurosawa mirrors it to us. The second part of Cloud sees the sudden appearance of an angry mob whose blunt goal it is to end Yoshii’s life. Their motives (jealousy, resentment, even the mere desire to have access to his money) are as disparate as their personalities – for those who have one, since some of its members only exist to enact vengeance upon someone they do not know, fueled solely by online hate speech in anonymous Internet chatrooms. There is not a single person in Cloud who is immune to irrational behavior, all of them narrow-minded (there is no stake here higher than having more than your neighbor) and steered by ‘instinct and impulse’, as someone defines Yoshii’s course of action.

Therefore, it is hollow shells rather than human beings that fight to the death in the last act of the film in a fitting scenario: an abandoned factory, which represents the pinnacle of the impressive look of the whole movie. Cloud is mostly made out of silence, emptiness, and washed-out colors, creating a gloomy atmosphere; lifeless on purpose – Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s filmmaking is as strong and thought through as ever in his shot compositions, his use of long takes, his abrupt cuts. Madness and loss of control reside only in the tale and the actions of the characters, with firearms as their definitive means of expression. After all, as one person says, is it not ‘surprisingly easy’ to pull the trigger and kill somebody? Cloud promises us a world where everybody can, and will, effortlessly turn into a murderer just to protect or obtain a few scraps of money. If you think this is hell, rest assured this is what the director aims for: the closing shot has us trapped inside a car moving towards a nightmarish landscape, with one of the two survivors of the massacre asking if he is in hell; the other answers, “Yes, but just focus on continuing making money“.