Cloud (Kuraudo)

 

Writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa

director on the set with Masaki Suda

CLOUD (Kuraudo)                B                                                                                                 Japan  (124 mi)  2024  d: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Now a death game begins.                                                                                                           —a dissatisfied customer

From the maker of CURE (1997), PULSE (2001), BRIGHT FUTURE (2003), Tokyo Sonata (2008), and Before We Vanish (Sanpo suru shinryakusha) (2017), all very different movies, known for making self-reflective psychological thrillers, where a common thread is the role technology plays in the modern world, playing on the collective fears of Japanese society, yet he never introduces special effects, preferring to use the classic tools of cinema over traditional American special effects and big stars, placing an emphasis on sound, lighting, photography, and editing combined with highly effective storytelling.  Noted for his psychological films that often focus on ambiguous narratives that accentuate the inner existential turmoil of characters and their search for meaning, Kurosawa is also known as one of the more intelligent and technically proficient filmmakers in the world today, yet he continues to experiment with new genres and styles, drawn by the idea of making an action thriller, where his contemporary work is just as thought-provoking as his distinctive earlier work.  Returning to a familiar theme of technology being a disruptive force, representing the emotional emptiness of modernity, this avoids the supernatural element of his earlier films, replaced in this instance by a scathing critique of capitalism, where an economy of exploitation causes a loss of identity, exploring the theme of media-amplified alienation, turning into a karma film, as it so prominently features cause and effect, with deceptive business practices leading to violent retributions, yet when that payback finally arrives, it’s not at all what we anticipate.  With an equal amount of oppressive mundanity and perverse amusement, this is a haunting change-of-life experience with lingering effects.  Stylishly subversive, yet also bold and unpredictable, there’s a sociopathic edge to each character that keeps viewers on edge, unsure of what’s about to happen, bearing some similarities to Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist (Aku wa sonzai shinai) (2023), which may not be surprising since Hamaguchi studied under Kurosawa at the Tokyo University of the Arts.  The idea for this story began in 2018, and may have originated with Takahiro Shiraishi, the “Twitter Killer,” who murdered and dismembered nine people in 2017, most of them young women, contacting his victims through social media, primarily Twitter, after they had posted about suicidal thoughts, luring them to his apartment under the guise of helping them, but then proceeded to rape and kill his victims, and was executed by hanging in Japan on June 27, 2025.  The Internet, from its dial-up infancy, was once viewed with such promise as this mystical and magical thing, thinking it was the answer to so many problems, a research tool that could access resource information with instantaneous results, without having to trek to the library, while things could get done so much faster and with greater accuracy, including correspondence with friends or business associates anywhere in the world, yet it also has a tendency to isolate and alienate people from general society, lowering the quotient for having to have social skills or good manners.  Over time we’ve become addicted to cellphones and social media, where an all-consuming narcissistic obsession has fueled an anonymous hate culture where no rules apply, as there is no referee or moderator to intervene, so people have free reign to do or say whatever dumb thing they please, however racist, homophobic, hateful, or misinformed, where you don’t need a moral compass to intentionally smear someone’s character, impugn anyone who’s different, or even invent fictitious scenarios or conspiracy theories that spread like wildfires (Hate culture is ruining the internet), creating waves of invisible and unwanted pressure just to get through each and every day. 

Screened out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2024, this film centers upon Ryosuke Yoshii, played with alienation and detachment by Masaki Suda, who voiced the Heron in Hayao Miyazaki’s latest The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2023), viewed as an ambitiously young but directionless factory worker from Tokyo who builds an illegitimate side business of black market reselling, operating “on impulse and instinct,” cornering the market by picking up merchandise on the cheap and then reselling it online under a pseudonym at exorbitant prices, impervious to the effect this has on others, cheating buyers and sellers alike, who feel they got swindled.  The film effectively shows how the digital frontier has infiltrated our lives and become a domain for our most troubling and malicious tendencies, a world where human relationships have been reduced to transactions.  Initially living in a cramped apartment with his girlfriend Akiko, played by Kotone Furukawa, from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 #10 Film of the Year Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Gûzen to sôzô) (2021), Yoshii decides to move to an undisclosed larger location out of the city, attempting to remain anonymous from disgruntled victims who are attempting to track him down.  Refusing to join the new business of his school friend Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), who helped bring him into the online resale business, while also turning down a promotional opportunity from his boss Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), telling him, “I’m just unassertive.  It only looks like I’m committed,” he becomes more and more disconnected from the world around him, losing all interest in anything except his bank account, and even avoids his relationship with Akiko while hiring a devoted assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), to help expand the business.  In a sly turn of events, the perpetually bored Akiko comes on to Sano, but he curiously rebuffs her advances with surprising resolve.  What stands out is the way Kurosawa visually expresses the online sale, where the computer becomes a central character, revealed in a very cinematic manner, creating anticipation and suspense, filling the screen with items for sale, all meticulously listed in ordered columns, changing color as they’re purchased, literally coming alive as customers express an interest in his merchandise one item at a time, ultimately becoming the realization of all his hard work and dreams, Clip from Cloud directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi YouTube (2:17).  But Kurosawa has something else in mind, as this isn’t an entrepreneurial success story, but something else altogether, a glacially paced thriller with unexpected twists and turns near the end, leaving viewers in the dark about where this is going, portraying the hidden face of the Internet and the anonymous people who hide behind the screens, pushing every trace of humanity aside in order to get what they want, becoming an exploration of the dark edges of our society, where this is a “The Internet will steal your soul movie,” with cautionary warnings about the kind of world this is becoming.  Going against the grain of a traditional Japanese work ethic, where working in solidarity with an entire team is the business model for achieving security and success, Yoshii is something of a lone wolf, an independent contractor who mostly displays feelings of ambivalence and uncertainty, yet a firm believer in opportunism and his own compulsion, with an allegiance to no one but himself. This puts him at odds with the status quo, but may reflect the perspective of a younger generation seeking quicker, more instantaneous methods of success, more reliant upon technology and their computer prowess, driven by wanting to see results now.   

Elegantly shot by Yasuyuki Sasaki, who worked on Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II (Netemo sametemo) (2018), using long takes and abrupt cuts, making exquisite use of empty space, where characters are often shot engulfed in their surroundings, with musical composer Takuma Watanabe adding his own eerie stylishness, with Shinji Watanabe’s positively brilliant sound design, Kurosawa has staged a generational divide choreography pitting the old ways against the new, which proceeds in a very slow manner, taking a while to get started, showing a quiet detachment, but viewers need to get acclimated to just what kind of business Yoshii is running, quitting his job at the factory, going all-in on his own business acumen, where an overly materialistic Akiko seems to be drawn to him over his ability to make money, no questions asked, but he starts clashing with both his assistant and girlfriend over his increasingly obsessive work habits.  What’s important in this film is that it features ordinary people leading ordinary lives.  A frustrated Akiko never figures out how to operate an espresso machine, supposedly an upgrade over a regular coffee maker, and eventually moves out when she is so completely neglected by his preoccupation with his business, while Yoshii also fires Sano after discovering he used his computer, with his assistant trying to warn him that others are angered by his questionable business ethics, or lack thereof, like stirring up a hornet’s nest, completely dismissing this notion that he needs to do a better job concealing his identity online, but this insider access feels too close for comfort and creates friction, especially when Sano refuses to be fired, claiming he’s only looking out for Yoshii’s interests.  Yoshii, on the other hand, can’t tell whether the threats are real or imagined, though there is a trail of random incidents left behind like breadcrumbs.  None of this sounds particularly dramatic or cinematic, but the filmmaker cleverly reveals only the barest outlines of a story, establishing a rhythm of disorientation and dread, where there is an outpouring of angry resentment against Yoshii, as people want to bring him down, driven by greed, hatred, self-interest, and desire, trying to follow his computer footprint, initially with no success, but an online forum produces his address (Yoshii inadvertently allowed his address to be seen on his phone during a bus ride), so a group bands together to go after him, revealed with such a remarkable economy of means, where an open door changes the entire trajectory of the film, veering into a cold thriller with a dark, satirical edge, CLOUD by Kurosawa Kiyoshi – Official clip 1 | #venezia81 ... YouTube (1:11).  Kurosawa always does more with less, which distinguishes him as an innovative filmmaker, making the most out of a seemingly innocuous situation, as it makes little sense for his former boss to show up ominously outside his place in the dead of night, adding an element of lingering creepiness, as we don’t really know why, CLOUD by Kurosawa Kiyoshi – Official clip | #venezia81 Fuori ... YouTube (1:37), but this soon escalates into the horror mode, as a swindler drama morphs into a standard thriller, shifting into a home invasion mode before turning into a bleak­ly fun­ny, full-blown action movie.  When it becomes apparent people are after him, Yoshii escapes into the woods to avoid a vengeful lynch mob that is out to get him.  Just when he thinks he has eluded them, he suddenly finds himself surrounded and kidnapped by a gang of disgruntled people armed to the teeth wanting to exact revenge, all with warped reasons for getting involved, where it gets confusing who they all are, a gangster, apparently, who joins forces with his former bosses and a few petty revenge seekers, leaving him with few options. 

Tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse, a man with a blowtorch intends to burn Yoshii alive and stream it online for profit, becoming some sort of gruesome revenge spectacle, an exaggerated overreaction to be sure, but they represent a Greek chorus of anger and resentment, people who have been easily manipulated, misled, and taken advantage of, powerless and seemingly without a voice, yet here they’re given a platform to exact retribution, but more surprises await, as things don’t go exactly as planned, where the warehouse format may remind some of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992).  Kurosawa interjects a few unforeseen obstacles in the form of Sano, his misunderstood and completely unappreciated, and fired, assistant who tracks him down by the GPS on his phone, turning out to be a former yakuza, who even after his release considers it his natural duty to defend his employer, turning into a Charles Bronson vigilante who intends to exact justice.  Coming out of nowhere, the quietly polite Sano turns into the X-factor, exhibiting surprising resourcefulness, stalking and killing the kidnappers with astonishing efficiency, rescuing his former boss who he still swears allegiance to, as if he never left his former position, combining forces to track down the remaining few that continue to pose a threat.  Yoshii is placed in the position of a combatant with a gun in his hand, completely bewildered how he found himself in this position, but what he’s called upon to do is shoot to kill in order to save his own life, revealing in no uncertain terms that it’s either kill or be killed, a metaphor for the cutthroat capitalist business landscape where it’s the Wild West out there, with real life gunslingers, dripping with a sense of paranoia and dread, with potentially violent costumers lurking around every shadowy corner, reminding us what unchecked capitalism looks like (The rise of end times fascism | Far right (US)).  This scenario references the Sam Peckinpah film STRAW DOGS (1971), where the meek husband of a violently raped woman turns into a fanatically-driven killer to exact justice.  Akiko even makes a late appearance, but her motives are suspicious, just like everyone else.  With a surreal ending that has a heavily absurdist literary No Exit aspect, Sano and Yoshii drive off into an apocalyptic orange-colored landscape, like falling into the abyss, with Sano professing his primary purpose is to make more money, where nothing else matters, as we hear a doomed Yoshii mutter under his breath, “So this is how you get into Hell.”  Probing the depths of human deception and depravity with an unblinking gaze, Kurosawa’s film is challenging in an untraditional way, offering ruminations on how our online preoccupations are draining peo­ple of their human­i­ty, as Yoshii and Sano form a symbiotic connection with an ambiguous future together. The title reflects the intangible, nebulous nature of the Internet where digital interactions and transactions occur in a vast, interconnected space, where things can be ephemeral and difficult to grasp, as this insightful satire of online capitalism and hate culture exposes a virtual world spilling out into the real world where violent incidents can occur for seemingly no reason whatsoever, as petty grudges and frustrations are blown way out of proportion.  The Internet, which can both connect people and become a catalyst for conflict, magnifies the worst in us, mirroring the endless rage that social media stokes, as virtual anger inevitably spills out into the physical world, something we commonly see every day.  While the Internet brings about the end of the world in PULSE, so eerily ahead of its time and prescient in its mixture of techno-horror and social commentary, we face the teetering fragility of this future at our own peril.    

Видео Cloud {Kuraudo} Masaki Suda-Kotone Furukawa ... entire film may be seen with English subtitles on YouTube (2:04:02)

Tokyo Sonata

 

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Kurosawa with Teruyuki Kagawa

Kurosawa with Kōji Yakusho

The director on the set with Kyôko Koizumi and Kōji Yakusho

TÔKYÔ SONATA                   A                                                                                                 Japan  Netherlands  Hong Kong  (119 mi)  2008  d: Kiyoshi Kurosawa 

This film will portray a very ordinary family in modern Japan.  I start from a point where lies, suspicion and a complete breakdown of communication already have established themselves within the family.  Without a doubt, this is ‘modern’ and this is also ‘Japan.’  However, I would like to show a glimmer of hope in the end.  Can I do that?  Even if I could do so, would that be something that saves a conventional family?  I just do not know now.  Since I do not know, I have a strong desire to make this film.                                                                                            —Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Director’s Statement)

This may be Kurosawa’s most original film, and arguably his finest, not like anything else viewed in the last twenty years, as it starts out as a rhythm of life film, showing the Ozu-like daily routine of a typical Japanese middle class family, with countless shots of passing commuter trains, causing flashing light to stream through the windows, where roles are organized like a mini-society, as each establishes their own territory, but somewhere the film goes off the rails, providing a ruthless look at a disintegrating family where there’s no stability holding them together, as the equilibrium has been broken by unexpected circumstances, each lost in a free float of what feels like a fever dream.  Somehow, someway, they manage through difficult times and find their way back, irrevocably changed by the intruding existential trauma, where in the end this is a superbly executed search for meaning film.  If you simply read the nothing special synopsis, you might wonder what all the fuss is about, with Kurosawa and co-writer Sachiko Tanaka adapting a screenplay written twenty years earlier by Australian Max Mannix, who had lived in Tokyo, but this is beautifully realized direction, where most of the film is composed of shots defined by architecture and geometric framing.  The intelligence of this film, the exquisite look, the fluid pace, the changes in tone and character, the playful use of genre expectations, the superb performances overall and the remarkable inventiveness and originality simply make it stand out above all others, so beautifully framed, shot after shot.  In the opening scene, like The Tempest, a storm rages outside, bringing havoc to this perfectly manicured indoor apartment, where the mother initially closes the door to keep the turbulent forces out, but then, strangely, opens the door again, which is a key moment in the film, as she's allowing the darkness to protrude inside the perfect order of their universe.  Slowly, darkness prevails for each of the characters, until they realize the power that lies within, ending with a perfect grace note, Tôkyô sonata - Kiyoshi Kurosawa (2008) - ending. YouTube (7:13).  As a point of reference, Kurosawa acknowledged in interviews that he was inspired by the family drama threatened by outside forces in David Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005).  Winner of the Jury Prize (2nd place) in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, it was also awarded the Silver Hugo as the 2nd Best Film (to HUNGER) at the 2008 Chicago Film Fest.   

Kurosawa is seen by many as a cult director due to his early works which helped define New Japanese cinema, showing an underground and energetic Japanese youth that are alienated from a modern society defined by a tilt towards consumerism, reflected in gimmicks and gadgetry, and old generation parents that don’t understand they can’t buy their way out of their children’s problems or comprehend why this new generation feels so vaguely uncertain about their future, deeply confused about coming to terms with a modern Japanese identity, especially after this younger generation supposedly had it so good.   Never one to show his hand, Kurosawa explores an ambiguous world of the supernatural in a film like CURE (1997), or utilizes ghosts in a full throttle horror film like PULSE (2001).  His films have a trademark sense of dread or elusiveness that’s hard to define, reflecting a world that slowly seems to be falling apart, adding to a certain mystique that surrounds his reputation.  One thing that impresses the most about this film is the filmmaker’s ability to continually redefine himself through his body of work, as this is unlike any of his other films, feeling more mature, more refined, perhaps aware that he’s being seen on a larger stage, so he sets his sights on a prevalent social phenomenon, the emasculation of the family patriarch through the loss and shame of unemployment, accompanied by an unraveling of the postwar maternal role, creating a rupture in the traditional family unit.  One scene perfectly encapsulates the mother’s growing sense of uselessness and invisibility, as she asks at one point, “Will someone please pull me up?” with her outstretched hands lingering in mid-air, waiting to be picked up from the sofa, but there’s no one there, as she’s met instead by an indifferent silence.  Above all, this remains an intelligent and principled work that continues to probe the many unseen layers of Japanese society, unmasking the invisible, examining people of all ages who exist but are rarely seen as they blend so perfectly into the homogenous whole.  TOKYO SONATA is a rare dark comedy that revels in its simplicity, but then tragically veers off course when things don’t go the way it seems into an undefined no man’s land of unrealized expectations, where characters find themselves fighting a losing battle against the chaos and violence that envelops them.

Kurosawa examines a modern Japanese family who are bright and educated, where they happily greet one another when they come home, eat together at the same table, and that for all practical purposes is a success story.  The director then slowly deconstructs this impression one member at a time, as if invaded by an invisible dark force that plagues each individual, making them behave out of context with how they understand their own lives, a reflection of the mass uncertainty sweeping the country, where a decade of economic stagnation in Japan led to a global financial crisis that has uprooted the lives of not just thousands but millions of workers around the world (did we ever recover?), creating an undercurrent of dread, shown through a series of increasingly audacious tonal shifts.  It’s a quiet film filled with absurdist humor offering subtle clues, continually challenging the audience’s perceptions of what they see, bringing a scene to the brink of closure, and then letting it remain incomplete, filming in fragments, like incomplete sentences, rather than completing the scene to the end.  In this way, the audience has to fill in the blanks and make up their own minds about what’s happening with each character.  By the end, altered by forces seen and unseen, where so much happens offscreen and so much is left unspoken, all are significantly different, yet appear just the same.  From start to finish, this is a modern day ghost story, as each character initially is seen within the context of order and authority, all based on the economic security of the father who goes off to work each day and supports his family.  In postwar Japanese society, you trained for a job, joined a company, and generally stayed there for life, becoming the economic model for providing your family financial security, but when an unforeseeable rift in the family structure occurs due to the father losing his job, everyone’s life must reconfigure itself, as each is offered a new beginning, turning into a shadow play where each must find themselves within the prevailing disorder.  Each character temporarily loses themselves to misfortune and the chaos of impermanence, where until a certain scene repeats itself from a different character’s perspective, there is plenty of prevailing humor.  Everything after that moment, however, feels like life or death consequences, where we see what a tenuous hold we have on our own sanity, where we can see how easily it can all slip away.        

The father, the multi-faceted Teruyuki Kagawa whose face reads whatever you want to see in it, is a corporate administrator who loses his job in the opening moments of the film.  With a nod to Laurent Cantet’s TIME OUT (2001), which the director claims he had not seen, rather than tell his wife and family who are so used to him going to work each day, he continues his little charade of pretending to go to work, because in Japan, the only way to exist is to appear like everyone else, where it’s all about maintaining appearances, conforming to the point of absurdity, especially when he meets another colleague who is doing the exact same thing, hanging out in food lines, the unemployment office, spending all day at the library, or most impressively, setting his cellphone to ring 5 times an hour so he can feign important business calls.  The friend is priceless, even asking the father over to his home where he can berate his lazy work ethic in front of his wife in order to maintain his stature as the voice of authority in his home.  The father is eventually challenged by his own family in much the same way.  The eldest son (Yû Koyanagi) is hardly ever at home, consumed by his studying and school activities, so when he announces he wants to join the American army, his father grows furious.  His son reasons that the American army protects Japan, so he will actually be doing his part to protect Japan, but when he’s sent to the Middle East war, he quickly discovers that the war is not his own, and for his family, those news reports about the war abroad that they never paid any attention to become substantially more traumatizing.  The youngest son, Kai Inowaki in a note perfect performance, is bright, perhaps too bright, as he inadvertently organizes a rebellion against his teacher’s morality after he is erroneously accused of bringing manga porn to class.  Against his father’s wishes, he decides to pursue piano lessons, one presumes because he has a crush on the attractive young teacher, Haruka Igawa, but he turns out to be a brilliant young student whose talent is so exceptional his father refuses to believe him.  Once more, his authoritative voice is challenged at home.  Easily the most far reaching and surreal segment is the strange happenings with the mother, former pop idol Kyôko Koizumi, who is nothing less than phenomenal in this film as the quiet voice of reason and civility in her proper household as the perfect mother, perhaps overprotective, usually taking her children’s side against their father, whose authority and sense of order is completely undermined by the end, or so it seems. 

What might seem surprising is the impression of how easily conformism and the entrenched social fabric all falls apart and how little it takes for that to happen, such as losing one’s job and the domino effect this has on the entire family.  Again, much of this feels suggested, where appearance is not necessarily reality, as if to play with our preconceptions, where perhaps not much has really changed at all.  The character development is well defined as we come to appreciate each character, yet it also remains ambiguous by the very nature of so much remaining unknown and incomplete.  This film has far reaching consequences that likely affects all of us, yet many will leave the theater without realizing any of that.  Just because the director places clues doesn’t mean people will find them or even begin to understand. Certainly one of the most appealing aspects is the artfully constructed quiet humanism balanced against the luminous look of the film, where much of the indoor scenes are shot in a golden hue and where so many shots feel perfectly framed by Akiko Ashizawa, not the least of which is the final shot.  This film requires interaction with the audience, where despite the meticulous detail in every scene, we’re left with so many unanswered questions, with a special appearance from Kurosawa regular Kōji Yakusho.  Sadness pervades over the quirky humor, where the absurd reality is hilariously funny, such as the dinner sequence with the friend, but then the actual reality that follows is anything but.  Kurosawa slowly changes the prevailing mood until we’re face to face with humiliation and discomfort, where the darkest scenarios affect each character, mysteriously switching from being the father’s story to being his wife’s, where each could easily lose their life in a meaningless instant, like the scene with the husband and wife at the mall that replays itself, where each has no comprehension whatsoever of what’s happening to the other, but all somehow manage to survive, perhaps simply because they have each other.  This is a sublime and loving film that toys with our failures and inadequacies, even the otherwise perfect piano teacher is getting a painful divorce, where we learn that from the most painful circumstances, there is a mysterious light that shines, as it does for the wife at the ocean, even though when she goes back it’s gone, creating a night of unending tension, but afterwards she is bathed by the morning sunlight, like a rebirth, which apparently is all that is needed, as she eventually finds her way back home, where the moving, perfectly drawn finale pulsates with an emotional catharsis.