Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film explores the morally repugnant world of resellers and those persecuting them, but offers little to enjoy or reflect on.
★★☆☆☆
A consistently surprising aspect of Kiysohi Kurosawa’s Cloud is that it manages to be both ridiculous beyond all plausibility and sluggish. Viewers are never given a chance to settle into its narrative, given how underwritten its characters are. Although shocking plot developments and showy twists have the potential to lurk around every corner, their use in this film’s more bombastic second half don’t make for a great piece of entertainment—much less an interrogative exploration of the morality underpinning these acts of violence.
Following the exploits of a fairly mysterious young man, Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who resells different goods, Cloud is quite unnerving even when nothing particularly dramatic — let alone tense — is happening. Its visual approach is slow and creeping, as if Ryosuke is about to reveal himself as a truly depraved person somewhere along the way. Instead, he’s a much more realistic villain than that, one who buys items for a fraction of their worth to profit greatly from these sellers’ misfortune/ignorance, or who scams consumers with products from knock-off brands.
It’s difficult to get a read on what exactly Ryosuke wants from life. His money-making schemes result in him being able to quit his factory job, much to the dismay of his employer Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa). But despite having more free time, a better home, and a new living environment in the countryside after he and his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) leave Tokyo, this protagonist seems no more fulfilled by his life. In fact, he doesn’t seem to feel much of anything. Perpetually wearing a half gormless, half melancholic expression, days of idle living slip by him, consumed by work without any guiding purpose. And while it’s not dull to watch his exploits, there are barely any notes of tension once his money-making schemes become obvious. The sluggish pacing mirrors Ryosuke’s lifestyle to a tee.
Just like this film as a whole, our protagonist thinks he’s being ambitious, but he hardly ever does anything. When he is working, it involves meeting with potential sellers, photographing new products and waiting listlessly for one of them to be sold, the tab displaying these items on his computer his only co-star for minutes on end. As for Akiko, she is seemingly just as unambitious, with little tying the pair together across this film’s runtime. If Ryosuke is dim, then Akiko is doubly so, her strongest display of personality involving despair over being unable to operate a coffee machine. Also present is Sano (Daiken Okudaira), a new assistant of Ryosuke and a consummate employee, who’s too wrapped up with being a diligent worker to display any characteristics beyond his emotionless approach to him and Ryosuke’s shared workload.
What begins as a sluggish thriller concludes as a tepid one, whose only saving grace are the brutal and to-the-point action sprinkled into this feature film. Kurosawa takes full advantage of how little these characters are fleshed out in Cloud’s second half, where familiar faces reappear with seemingly inverted personalities. However, this is never true of Ryosuke. Perhaps that’s because this money-obsessed figure is representative of the ills of capitalism, a beast that requires more and more to sustain itself even when it has met its needs, never appearing satisfied with what it has accrued. If that was the goal, though, the point falls short of any semblance of resonance when it’s conveyed through such a blank slate of a protagonist.
Resellers like Ryosuke are scummy individuals, but the film’s social commentary sadly begins and ends there. As for its pulpier elements, they require some serious suspension of disbelief. A group of profoundly stupid people who feel wronged by Ryosuke seek to punish him, consistently allowing him to evade their capture by forgetting to watch him. The excuses behind some of these villains throwing their lives away are so half-baked that you’ll be left searching for metaphors or themes to unpack, only to learn that such an investigation is fruitless. There’s no semblance of comedy in sight, yet much of the plotting feels like an extended joke.
Entire sections of this story feel like an improv experiment worked out in real-time, which would explain some of the blind spots in plausibility. With no sincere attempts made to develop any of these characters, the issue is not so much that the twists and turns that spin this narrative in knots fail, but that they were never given the opportunity to succeed in the first place.
Cloud is a silly film bereft of comedy and a weightless experience with little to say about society. Even more disappointing are the scant psychological elements of this alleged psychological thriller. Only the film’s brief moments of violence are compelling, with Kurosawa proving to be a far better director than writer in his latest film. Even Cloud’s ending, which implies a figurative form of apocalyptic doom on the horizon, feels as if it was made to be scoffed at.
The Verdict
Cloud consistently fails to enter second gear, with sluggish pacing and a flimsy storyline that limps towards its denouement. Minimal characterisation, preposterous plotting and little in the way of social or psychological resonance render this film hollow.
Words by Cian McGrath
Cloud is in UK cinemas from 25 April.
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