Cloud Film Review: Surprisingly Predictable

Cloud bears many of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s controlled and eerie cinematic trademarks, but it is too underwritten to even come close to matching his previous successes.

Perhaps the Kurosawa name being attached to it lifts expectations too high; you keep waiting for the events to elevate into something punchier. More accurately, however, this is just a disappointing and run-of-the-mill thriller-cum-satire, albeit a relatively engaging one, from one of Japan’s leading filmmakers.

Cloud begins as Kurosawa’s films often do: in an intriguing and mysterious fashion. Yoshii (Masaki Suda, The Boy and the Heron) is a young man living in Tokyo who resells goods online, taking advantage of people desperate to shift their stock and then elevating his own prices for massive profit. He conducts this parasitic-like work robotically and without remorse. Kurosawa shoots these initial events with clean precision, shrouding Cloud in an eerily sterilised and emotionless aura. The filmmaker has often turned his lens to modern day societies, and with his latest, capitalism is his main focus.

After a number of disgruntled people band together online to track down Yoshii, who operates under a pseudonym on the internet, things take a turn for the worse—both for Yoshii and for the film itself. For Yoshii, who has just moved with his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) to a remote house in the woods, the immediate danger is from this group of vengeful vigilantes. For Cloud, the moment the suspense ends and the action begins, things take a severe nosedive.

After such an engaging opening hour or so, the proceeding half of the film feels like a disappointment. Everything is just a bit predictable, and proceedings eventually plateau out into something very formulaic. Kurosawa’s ambiguity often shines, but here it comes across as lazy, with baffling characters, random events, and little context. Small visual flourishes and intriguing dialogue keep things interesting, but between the alluring opening and an experimental but fascinating conclusion, the bloated middle section of Cloud sorely sticks out.

As Yoshii, Suda is fantastic. He fits seamlessly into the money-motivated world, working at his monotonous day job before surfing the web for bargains late into the evening. Suda captures Yoshii’s robotic nature superbly, and carefully gives us a character who takes a long time to learn his lesson—and even when he does, it’s too late. Similarly meticulous in its construction is the film’s camerawork. Yasuyuki Sasaki’s considered cinematography elevates the earlier parts of Cloud into something hugely engrossing, whilst surprising stylings merge with the drab world that Kurosawa presents.

This isn’t to say the middle of Cloud, which is very action-orientated, is bad; the set pieces are conducted with a rigour and tightness to ensure the events are compelling. The violence is stark, shocking, and even frightening in how detached the characters who commit such acts are. Nevertheless, this watchability doesn’t cover up the fact that Cloud is severely lacking. It is far from the deep-dive into a capitalist, internet-crazed society that it presents itself as. Kurosawa or not, this is a cheap and undercooked film.

Cloud had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 30, 2024. Read our review of Chime!