Can petty criminals stay in petty crime forever? It’s possible that grifters and scammers can slide under the radar if they can share the same restraint as a person knowing when to quit at a casino. But to want more is a human’s natural reach. To want more and get more becomes a self-feeding machine of hubris: we do well, we want to go bigger for more, and keep acclimating until we hit a wall. Maybe that collision will be humbling enough to bring us back to beginnings, or to never try again. In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, we meet Yoshii (Masaka Suda), a factory worker in Tokyo with little shine to his life and, to be honest, his personality. The opening scene introduces him as somewhat merciless; he buys off an inventory stock of patented machines from a married couple who clearly is distraught by his size of his offer yet has no other choice in regaining their losses. He then rebrands the machines as vaguely named “therapeutic machines” (with the help of Microsoft Paint — my guy!) and sits in the dark, illuminated and fueled by the waiting game of watching these machines being purchased off some nondescript website.

Because he rebuffs a promotion at his current job, we could have assumed that Yoshii is content at daytime worker and nighttime seller. No – instead, the thought of working at a passionless job drives him to quit (much to an even more rattled reaction from his boss Takimoto) and invest in his online vendor business by renting a larger house in the countryside. He brings along his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), who shares a baseline lackadaisical approach to their working-wage lives. With a quiet demeanor and calm response to emotional outburst, it’s hard to believe that Yoshii could be classified as greedy as other film characters that have a more obvious thirst and drive for the green (or considering that yen comes in different colors, the rainbow?). But if we squint closer, we can see the currency signs in his eyes.

Cloud belongs to an interesting genre that talks about our modern times without needing the modern slang or politics for decorative context. The get-rich-quick dream imbues today’s rationale for side hustles that either are legit (second or third jobs) or a bit shady (life coaches – not my guys!). While Yoshii is rather introverted, he shares a similar desire to influencers and people who want to make money however they can, and however fast they can. Similar to Kurosawa’s To The Ends of the Earth, a film that blends a creepy edginess with trendy tourism, Cloud is about a topic that deserves a movie of some sorts, and it’s pretty neat that Kurosawa is the one to do it.

Unfortunately, Kurosawa’s sharp eye for framing characters is lost in this film. Akiko Ashizawa, the cinematographer who helped sharpen tension in To The Ends of the Earth and Creepy, is swapped for Yasuyuki Sasaki, who had previously worked on Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s dreamlike Asako I & II. Because Yoshii’s life seems so both devoid of human connection and crowded of meaningless items, scenes of him staring at his screen with boxes of his goods stored neatly behind feels neither scary nor engaging. The only times where I felt like we were watching something deliberate was when the camera would slowly turn to face Yoshii a few times, as if his face reveal is enough to creep a nervousness under his skin.

At some point, an event (or in the category of psychological thrillers, a reveal?) occurs that flipped the tone for me. What felt like a “Where is this going?” became a farce of biting vengeance. Starting with the dead rat on his doorstep in front of his house, it wasn’t surprising that Yoshii was going to find out what an eye for an eye meant. However, I had a surprising guffaw when the first perpetrator was revealed. It might be easy to scam people, but nothing becomes more easily rattled than people who hate a certain person. May the haters win.

While it’s possible that Kurosawa could have made this film if he himself was a victim of online scams, the movie doesn’t give in to victim classification as they generally would in his other traditional crime films. In some ways, could we almost feel bad for Yoshii for not knowing what the limit is? I truly don’t think the billions of people on this earth would ever say that they have enough money. The get-rich attitude then morphs into the get-richer attitude. We know that the sfumato of the dream can make it hard to see when the line should be drawn.

Cloud
2024
dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
124 min.

Screens Friday, 8/1 through Thursday, 8/7 @ Brattle Theatre – click here for showtimes and ticket info