This review may contain spoilers.
2024 has been a busy year for Kiyoshi Kurosawa. This festival season, the circuit has been circulating three (!) fresh releases of his.“Chime” premiered at Berlinale, “Cloud” at Venice, “Serpent’s Path” is slated for San Sebastian. Of these, “Cloud” has been well-regarded. It has just been selected as Japan’s entry for Best International Film for the 97th Academy Awards and as of Thursday, made its North American debut at Toronto International Film Festival.
Cloud is screening at Toronto International Film Festival
Audiences buzzing with excitement greeted the film on the first night of the fest, and “Cloud” answered well in kind. The feature follows Ryosuke Yoshii (played by the indelible Masaki Suda), who quits his job as a factory worker to get into the Internet reselling business. At first, everything seems to go swimmingly. He moves to a large house in the countryside with his lover, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa); he hires a new assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira); and, most importantly, he begins to earn a pretty penny from his new business by marking up his products. Things quickly go south, however, when Yoshii’s blatant dishonesty starts to earn him enemies. Scorned business partners and scammed customers team up over the Internet to enact a suitable revenge — until they realize that enacting vengeance is much more difficult in practice than in theory.
The band of vindictive vagrants will remind viewers of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (1992). The strangers come together for a shared vision, yet they constantly bicker amongst themselves due to different ulterior motives. One, for example, has nothing to lose, because he’s a murderer-on-the-lam; another has nothing to lose because he literally lost it all through Yoshii’s scam; and yet another is just his ex-boss at the factory, miffed that Yoshii did not welcome him into his home. Throughout it all, Yoshii remains supremely confused (and to a degree, rightfully so) as to why these particular people have teamed up against him.
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Confusion doesn’t protect against consequences, however, as Yoshii finds his life at the mercy of these individuals. All the same, Kurosawa keeps us at a distance from Yoshii’s panicked interiority. Instead, he frames the violence with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. He shoots the thriller in broad daylight; he keeps everyone in long shot. As a result, though Yoshii is suffocated, kidnapped, tied up, and gagged, Kurosawa lets us know exactly where each and every individual member is blocked in relation to Yoshii. What could be spectacular violence and utter suspense gets watered down into stage play-like blocking, where we can comfortably watch the anonymous avengers begin their procedural torture from afar.
The camera’s aloofness gives way to a situational irony that finds its zenith in the film’s twist when the baby-faced Sano, Yoshii’s faithful assistant, comes to his boss’s rescue. Daiken Okudara’s confident march into the scene of despair recalls the coolness of Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator” (1984). The life-threatening situation does not deter his Sano; the castigators’ cries do not surprise him. Instead, Okudara performs Sano with an utmost certitude, endowing his character with an obvious charisma. For Kurosawa, karma is a bitch unless Sano is by your side.
In this vein, Kurosawa’s whimsy shines through even in the title. After the screening, Kurosawa revealed that “Cloud” is a pun in Japanese. The word spelled out in Katakana could refer to either “crowd” or “iCloud”, allowing him to think about the sociality built into the relationships between the characters. However, as he admits, he only found out that the words are spelled differently in English later. He decided to keep the title regardless, because of the original intent.
To this end, his cavalier approach to the classic genre thriller works, but only to a degree. As the stakes grow higher and higher, the thriller is bound to keep audiences at the edge of their seats. However, with each twist and turn, Kurosawa only keeps us at an arms-length from the drama. We thus get to see the ridiculousness of Yoshii’s situation; we end up leaking a chuckle here and there. “Cloud” puts us privy to his satirical whimsy, who finished off the Q&A on a similar note. If so much of the film references how the characters will see hell, one audience member cheekily asked, what would heaven seem like for the characters? Kurosawa paused for a moment, and then smiled. “All the actors had a lot of fun, whether they were killing or were killed. So maybe it was like heaven on-set.”
