“Cloud” Is a Cautionary Tale of E-Commerce—and the Summer’s Best Action Movie

Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), the thirtysomething protagonist of the mesmerizing Japanese thriller “Cloud,” is never more content than when he’s in front of his computer. Some will surely relate, but Yoshii—lean, handsome, and aloof—is no one’s idea of an Everyman. In a dim, cramped Tokyo apartment, he parks himself a short distance from the monitor, peering at row after row of identical blinking icons, each one indicating an item he’s selling online. Within minutes, nearly all his inventory has been sold out. Yet Yoshii, though now hundreds of thousands of yen richer, barely cracks a smile. What excites him isn’t the acquisition of wealth so much as the cool, competitive ambience of e-commerce itself: the comforting glow of the screen, the silence and solitude of the transactions, and the rapidity with which those icons change color and status, all blinking affirmations of a job well done.

Yoshii is an online reseller, snapping up goods in bulk and hawking them online at outrageously marked-up prices. The products themselves—knockoff designer bags, limited-edition collectible dolls—are of no more consequence to him than the misfortunes of those he’s ripping off. In the first scene, Yoshii offers to buy thirty medical-therapy devices from an older couple (Masaaki Akahori and Maho Yamada) for ninety thousand yen, or about six hundred U.S. dollars—far less than he will later charge for a single unit. The sellers protest, knowing they’re being had, but also aware that they have no better option. Yoshii, ignoring their anger, sets about loading the devices into his truck. You sense, in this and his other interactions, not just an indifference to emotion but an outright impatience with it, and a growing desire to be purged of extraneous human contact altogether.

This includes contact with people who have, until now, considered themselves his friends and colleagues. The film’s early scenes wring tense variations on a cynical theme: again and again, a poker-faced Yoshii ignores a quietly desperate plea for help, mercy, or just basic respect. As his business takes off, Yoshii decides to quit his day job at a clothing factory, to the shock and dismay of his boss, Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), who had just offered him a promotion. A longtime friend, Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), who brought Yoshii into the reselling racket to begin with, tries in vain to secure an investment from him in a new business venture. In each of these edgy, increasingly unfriendly encounters, it isn’t what Yoshii says but what he doesn’t say—about his intentions, his methods, and his success—that projects an air of contempt and elicits the resentment of others.

Before long, Yoshii begins receiving ominous warnings—a dead rodent left outside his apartment, a trip wire laid across his motorcycle path, an unwelcome guest at his front door—and decides it’s time to leave Tokyo. He finds a house in a remote, wooded area, spacious enough to serve as the base of his ever-expanding operations. There’s also room for his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furakawa), though her presence in the house, and in his life, feels peripheral at best; Yoshii pays scarcely more attention to her than he does to Sano (Daiken Okudaira), a newly hired young assistant who takes to the job with touching, sometimes meddlesome eagerness. At every step, Yoshii tolerates the presence of others only insofar as they don’t interfere with his process or bring too much color into his new home, which, despite scenic views, has the vibe of an especially dull, characterless office.

“Cloud” is the latest piece of wickedness from the director and screenwriter Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has spent much of his four-decade-plus career braiding together the conventions of genre and the social and spiritual mores of contemporary life. So prolific is Kurosawa—so exhaustively has he explored avenues of supernatural horror, apocalyptic science fiction, investigative procedural, and other thriller formats—that it’s especially daunting to play the usual auteurist game of pan-œuvre contrasts and comparisons. Even so, there are moments in “Cloud” that, for me, echoed Kurosawa’s “Pulse,” an intensely unnerving ghost story that was released in Japan in 2001, in which the director, sending out grim feelers into the then nascent arena of the internet, posed a series of techno-philosophical riddles: What if our screens were portals into the overflowing netherworld of the afterlife? What if the isolation of a terminally online existence were a prelude to the “eternal loneliness” of death?

(A side note: “Pulse” opened in American theatres in 2005, released by Magnolia Pictures. Before then, it had spent four years in the purgatory of Miramax Films, which, rather than releasing it, poured its resources into an English-language remake—an act of product acquisition, suppression, and dilution to make Yoshii’s middleman scam look fairly benign.)

“Pulse” emerged during the last gasp of the floppy-disk era, and, though its efficient scariness remains undulled, its deployment of shadowy web-based apparitions—ghosts in the machine, in every sense—now suggests an early, vaporous grasp of a technology whose mysteries were still ripe for the probing. More than two decades later, not much in the way of mystery remains; online culture has become inextricable from the work we do, the relationships we forge, the purchases we make. It’s the air we breathe, and we’ve become inured to its toxicity. Yoshii himself has come to regard it not as a poison so much as an antidote—a solution to the pesky problem of direct, in-person, technologically unmediated human interaction.

It is fitting, then, that there are no ghosts to speak of in “Cloud.” With the exception of one strange, teasingly surreal scene, which conjures the feel of a yakuza thriller set somewhere between a criminal underworld and a metaphysical overworld, Kurosawa sidesteps any hint of the supernatural. (If you wish to preserve any sense of surprise, read no further.) The horrors that lie in wait are those of a bracingly straightforward revenge picture, a B-movie shoot-’em-up, in which Yoshii’s enemies, neatly lined up in the film’s first half, are methodically armed and unleashed in the second. They’re intent on answering Yoshii’s digital crimes with brutally analog punishments—a game of doxing and score-settling that might as well be called “Cutting Out the Middleman.”

Much violence ensues, which Kurosawa directs with a cold, pitiless, and relentlessly sustained excitement. Ever assiduous and unhurried in his staging of action, he allows sequences of intricately choreographed mayhem to spill from one room to another, out into the surrounding wilderness, and, finally, across the vast, cavernous expanse of an abandoned warehouse. But, even amid the loud, incessant pop of gunfire, Kurosawa avoids monotony; he has a knack for embedding ideas within action, and for developing action in ways that trigger yet more ideas. Watching it all play out, you can imagine real-life versions of this grim scenario—perhaps already being arranged in especially godforsaken corners of the dark web—in which people pay for the opportunity to hunt down their enemies as a form of recreation. The gunplay, orchestrated around clever hiding spots and methodically laid obstacles, sometimes mimics the episodic mechanics of a video game, as if Yoshii and his pursuers had, at some point, crossed the line from realism into a dimension of online fantasy.

That tension between modes gives “Cloud” tremendous visceral and intellectual force, plus a persistent air of moral inquiry. Kurosawa poses a connection between the brutish intimacy of physical violence and the callous detachment of online violence. He wants to cut through the dull, anesthetizing membrane of the internet and resensitize us to the specific, personal human realities—names, faces, emotions, histories, struggles—that lurk behind every username. But he also leaves us with a far more unsettling conclusion: namely, that a culture of quick-click gratification has so thoroughly stripped away the veneer of civilized society, and exposed and exacerbated such vast inequities of class and money, that a will to annihilate our chosen nemeses might be the only honest human impulse we have left. The final estimation of “Cloud,” as chilling as it is hard to refute, is that the internet hasn’t created an empathy deficit but merely exposed one that’s been there all along. ♦