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PORTSIDE CULTURE

CLOUD IS A TECHNO-THRILLER FOR THE AGE OF ONLINE HUSTLE CULTURE  
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Joon Lee
August 17, 2025
Jacobin
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_ The internet has robbed the world of much of its mystery and
replaced it with the jaded cynicism of online grifters. Kiyoshi
Kurosawa’s film Cloud explores this bleak world dominated by people
who just can’t log off. _

Masaki Suda stars in Cloud, 2024. , (Nikkatsu/Tokyo Theatres Company)


 

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the internet of 2001 has been replaced by the commercialized blandness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 because it’s unclear whether he is capable of wanting
anything at all. While he makes half-hearted promises to his
girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) about getting married and starting
a new life, the only thing that seems to give Yoshii any semblance of
pleasure is watching the flashing lights that accompany successful
sales on his seller page. Suda imbues Yoshii with the hollowed-out
look of a hypnosis victim resigned to chasing the interminable cycles
of the online economy. In one memorable shot, Yoshii watches a coffee
grinder spinning endlessly in place as if observing a kindred spirit.

The monotone rhythms of Yoshii’s life are occasionally invaded by
Antonioni-esque non sequiturs: we see him discovering a dead rat on
his doorstep or recoiling from a faceless figure on a bus. Although
these detours point to a simmering paranoia underneath Yoshii’s
lifestyle, they are too brief and uninspired to generate much tension.
What does shine through is the film’s bizarre sense of humor. The
entire social fabric of Yoshii’s world operates on the logic of the
terminally online, and the film delights in presenting absurd, alien
renditions of everyday interactions. In one cringe-inducing scene,
Yoshii introduces Akiko to a business associate who behaves as if he
is on a red pill forum (“I didn’t you know you’d found
conventional happiness,” he tells Yoshii). In another, Yoshii is
stalked by a former boss who is obsessed with delivering generic pep
talks that seem lifted from YouTube self-help videos.

As his business begins to take off, Yoshii quits his job and moves out
of Tokyo to an isolated suburb. There, in a sterile lakeside cabin
that resembles a WeWork, he dedicates himself fully to his reselling
obsession, gradually disentangling himself from the last of his
humanity in the process. He barely bats an eye when Akiko, fed up with
the crippling boredom of her new life, abandons him.

The film takes a jarring turn in its second half, when we abruptly
shift perspectives to a debt-ridden reseller who has recently been
scammed by Yoshii. We soon learn that an assorted group of Yoshii’s
enemies and victims have been conspiring online to murder him via
livestream. They have no real desire to recover lost funds or enact
vigilante justice — they don’t even seem particularly angry at
Yoshii. The point, if there is one, is simply online attention and
“a bit of stress relief.” Like Yoshii, the mob seems zombified, as
if their violence is simply an inevitable outgrowth of the same cycles
of transaction that fuel Yoshii’s resale addiction.

_Cloud_’s depiction of the mob harkens back to previous Kurosawa
films such as _Cure, _which centered on violence committed by
ordinary people under the influence of hypnosis.
Whereas_ Cure _derived potent horror from the dead-eyed, puppet-like
movements of its slashers, _Cloud _repurposes the same devices for
bleak comedy. There is something undeniably hilarious about a group of
murderers who handle shotguns like gardening tools and affect the
bored, attention-seeking nihilism of a 4chan board. In one of the
film’s funniest scenes, the mob bickers over whether one of its
members should be allowed to keep a mask on to preserve his anonymity
as Yoshii sits bound and gagged in a nearby chair.

Yoshii is eventually rescued by his loyal assistant Sano, kicking off
an extended gunfight between the duo and their captors.
Curiously, _Cloud_ makes the decision to deliberately remove every
last bit of suspense from its climax. The set is barren and brightly
lit; the camera work is flat and utilitarian, often resembling
a _Call of Duty_ game. The pacing of the violence has the same
repetitive matter-of-factness as the sequences where Yoshii is
shipping handbags. Most importantly, nobody seems particularly worried
about dying — after all, what do these guys have to look forward to
if they make it out alive? What should be a cathartic bloodbath ends
up feeling like doomscrolling.

Kurosawa’s uncanny approach to his final set piece will no doubt
alienate many viewers. It is, however, a perfect conclusion to the
world he has crafted, one in which everything — even violence — is
flattened by the spiritual vacuum of the modern internet.

_Pulse _worked as a conventional horror film because it was set in a
world in which the isolating, depersonalizing potential of the
internet was a new force, something that could possibly come for our
souls. _Cloud _is perhaps best categorized as an anti-horror, one
that captures the disquieting — and at times bleakly funny —
emptiness of navigating a world where there is no fear because there
are no souls left to be lost.

Near the end of the film, Yoshii confronts his fiercest rival, who
declares they are both headed to hell when they die. Yoshii emerges
from that duel victorious and spends the final scene contemplating his
next business move. He looks like he’d rather be in hell.

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Contributors

Joon Lee is a writer and filmmaker based in New York City.

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