‘Cloud’ Venice International Film Festival 2024 Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Crafts Another Beautifully Grim World
Throughout his nearly half-century of making movies, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has demonstrated a peerless ability to point out veins of dysfunction and fragility that underpin modern society. In the seductive Cure, violence waits to pounce in every domestic space. In Pulse, the internet’s promise of unlimited connection becomes an invitation for the loneliest specters to drive mortal users insane. Tokyo Sonata forgoes the director’s most overt horror instincts for a disquieting portrait of a nuclear family’s disintegration.
But these are some of Kurosawa’s most well-known, celebrated works; in the more niche, currently-out-in-print corners of his filmography, the prolific director has mapped out thorny, unsettling perspectives on revenge, identity, and comically cruel fate. Cloud, which just premiered at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival and is the last of three new projects from Kurosawa to debut in 2024, is a unique blend of his creative look at the world around us and the minimalist descents into vengeance that gave Serpent’s Path and Eyes of the Spider—his 1998 dyad of low-budget thrillers shot back-to-back—their cult reputations.
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In its patient crescendo of distress around an amoral internet reseller Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), Cloud does more than dissuade you from fleecing someone on Depop; it’s a pristinely crafted and grimly ironic rebuttal to the veneer of anonymity with which digital life seduces us.
Our abrupt introduction to Yoshii’s life succinctly sets up the next two hours: he inspects a pile of therapy machines in the garage of the older Tonoyama (Masaaki Akahori) and presses him to sell them all at a rate Yoshii assures him is the best possible offer. When Tonoyama watches the young man pack away the boxes into his van and drive away, he does not know just how egregiously Yoshii will drive up the price, or that they will sell out almost instantly. But the bleak frown fixed on his face indicates that fuel has been added to some suppressed, humiliated, and angry fire.
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Yoshii’s dead-eyed opportunism is convincingly relayed by Suda, who talks to his superiors with a performative soft-spokenness that sometimes barely conceals the contempt brewing inside him. The most profound relationship Yoshii has is probably with his online auction account. As he watches sales come through one by one on a busy computer screen, he sits a respectful distance apart from it like they’re sharing a hallowed ritual. Yoshii is alert to every change in his environment, quickly assessing and registering slights towards him and his work, even though he rarely considers the moral violations of his profiteering.
For the first half of Cloud, Yoshii takes advantage of colleagues, friends, and customers with impressive apathy. He declines a promotion at his mundane factory job, refuses to invest in a senior classmate’s startup, and extorts faceless buyers online with inflated price tags. As his side hustle picks up steam, he moves to a remote house with his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa). The dedication to his hustle is troubled by a pulsating, asphyxiating dread you might recognize from most Kurosawa movies—carefully composed empty space behind characters, pockets of abrupt silence, and jarring cuts to disrupt a scene’s flow. It gathers menacingly over Yoshii like, well, a dark cloud.
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If you’re into Cloud for the sustained creepy mood, you might be let down by the film’s second half, which largely replaces the minimalist dread with the familiar stakes of violent thrillers. While it’s easier to fall out of favor with a mood-rich thriller once it abandons its abstract chills for more grounded life-and-death conflicts (it’s not helped by Kurosawa stumbling with some too-convenient plot developments), the reveal of what’s been spiraling around Yoshii in Cloud’s back half is far too thematically resonant to dismiss.
Yoshii spends much of Cloud in an illusion of complete control, protected by his wealth of experience screwing people over and largely immune to anxiety. The way that Yoshii’s safety is threatened and violated feels like it’s lifted straight from one of his nightmares. What ends up pursuing him is deliciously absurd without ever losing its menacing edge. Mirroring the abandoned industrial aesthetic of Serpent’s Path, Kurosawa keeps us on our toes with a hostage rescue climax that paints a fuller picture of the selfish, aggrieved violence Yoshii helped usher into the world. Capped off with a dreamlike epilogue, Cloud is another morbidly curious look at a sick world from Kurosawa, pulling from his exemplary body of work to remind us that his films can be as sharp and surprising as they are dark and dangerous.
Summary
‘Cloud’ is another morbidly curious look at a sick world from Kurosawa.
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