In his 2001 horror classic Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa portrays the internet as a space of dark enchantment, a portal for evil spirits to invade the world of the living. Cloud, a new thriller which sees Kurosawa return to the subject twenty-four years later, contends with a vastly different online environment: whatever enchantment existed on the internet of 2001 has been replaced by the commercialized blandness of sigma grindset sermons and AI slop. Black Mirror, now in its seventh season, has become tired and repetitive, unable to compete with a world that continues to surpass its bleak depictions of the spiritual darkness of cyberspace. In this jaded landscape, Cloud faces a unique challenge: how does one make a thriller about the internet when the web has become so boring?
The modern web is, first and foremost, a place to sell things. Fittingly, Cloud follows Ryosuke Yoshii, a blank-faced Tokyo factory worker with a side gig as an online reseller. Yoshii is surreally dull, speaking in a terse monotone and habitually wearing clothes that blend into the wallpaper behind him. His life is a mechanical series of wholesaler negotiations, online sales postings, and product drop-offs.
Yoshii appears to deal mostly in meaningless goods, such as quack medical devices and fake designer handbags, which he offloads onto other unsuspecting resellers through a video game–like e-commerce platform. He isn’t selling products as much as he is participating in a never-ending chain of speculation and misery, one that brings to mind the hype-based frauds and pyramid schemes that are a fixture of the modern web economy.
The film’s first act wonderfully captures the claustrophobic circularity of Yoshii’s life through its repetitive editing and the disquieting aloofness of Masaki Suda’s central performance. The claustrophobia is made worse by the fact that he seems to have no true exit strategy: it’s unclear what Yoshii wants from his resale profits…
Auteur: Joon Lee
