Cloud (Kuraudo, 2024) ‘CIFF’ Movie Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Minor Con Thriller Takes Scrappy Turns

In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud” (Original title: Kuraudo), anyone is capable of hiding secrets that stun and shock. Gradually, however, they spill out in an angry, vicious bid for self-preservation. But this film is a unique, diverting offering from the director whose career revels in unnerving sensations that create lasting dents in the mind. Here, however, he swaps those bone-chilling effects for a film that slinks into action thriller terrain in oblique ways initially before fully blowing out.

The seemingly placid Yoshii (Masaki Suda) has a job at a factory but he’s more invested in his online e-resell pursuit. That gives him quick money though he grows dissatisfied and aches to maximize his scam fortune. Despite a promotion at the factory, he quits and relocates to the countryside where he puts himself deeper into the online auction of fake products. Naturally swindling at the rapid progression that he does inevitably brings closer its heavy price.

The emphasis is on the banality of crime and sin. The director pulls aside the drape on regular folks proceeding with their lives in a seemingly commonplace manner. Greed explodes though one may be convinced repercussions can be deferred for as long as possible. But of course, retribution and punishment will sneak up, bursting through a carefully concerted façade of normalcy. Sooner or later, the veil parts, and the baying for blood kick-starts.

“Cloud” unfolds mostly in a low-key mode. Suspense and apprehension are kept spare and modest. So when someone creeps up on Yoshii, it’s genuinely startling. In one such scene, the music is muted. Kurosawa keeps scenes calmly composed. But you can also sense the cracks developing. You can tell comeuppance will soon rear its head. The character is totally unbothered as he burrows deeper into his shady business. He takes an assistant Sano (Daiken Okudaira) but is wary of reposing too much trust in him.

Cloud (Kuraudo, 2024) — A still from “Cloud” (“Kuraudo,” 2024)

It’s in the film’s chilling final scene the lack of redemption and yet a twinge of remorse shades on Yoshii. It’s like a glimpse of hell. Doom has arrived. Morality has wholly excused itself from the scene. The scene casts the background as a murky vision. Is this what Yoshii signed up for? Is he prepared to accept what awaits him as the forbidding price of his actions? There’s no more chance for half-measures. Once your soul has been sold, there’s no turning back.

Kurosawa’s gaze on humanity is pitiless and grim. There are a lot of contradictions, some puzzling and a tad implausible, undertowing the characters in “Cloud.” Anyone can shock the other very cruelly and bitterly. The screenplay favors throwing in surprises along the way that open up new angles to characters we might have otherwise dismissed as too passive and ineffectual. While some do land, a major one rankles. The girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) is made to act all effete and fragile until she reveals several shades of manipulation and greed.

Not all switches to deviousness in the screenplay come off as fully convincing especially because the film situates these transitory points as rushed, more eager to surprise us than offer cohesive character development. But it is also crucial to note Kurosawa doesn’t paint his characters with outsized malice, rather they are individuals stuck in desperate circumstances aiming to get back on those who’ve wronged them or eyeing a glossier future. A tinge of wretchedness and tragedy tails them instead of overt, exaggerated wickedness.

“Cloud” soars in the long shootout section where the revengers attempt a coldly planned agenda but they are so inherently hardscrabble and clueless in dodging an unforeseen opponent that the whole operation comes apart. The rough-shod appeal of the sequence set in a steel mill as revenge is sought reframes the situation in amusing, wacky ways. Yoshii, who believes he can evade consequences as long as he wants, is confronted with the fallout of his small-time crimes which accumulate to deadly effect. The unshapeliness of the shootout scene lends fuzzy, unpredictable energy to “Cloud.”