Andrew’s Take:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa can evoke horror like no one else. Perhaps my favorite example of the specific way he scares his audience comes from 2001’s Pulse, an absolute omen of a film about the internet causing mass-scale depression and suicidality. At one point in the film, a character is visited by a ghost, but we don’t see the ghost itself — instead Kurosawa’s camera holds close on the horrified character’s face as the soft hum of room noise completely drops out of the sound mix and we hear only the ghost calmly repeating “Help me. Help me. Help me.”
Cloud is not exactly a horror film, but it horrifies in similarly minimalistic ways. One of the most thrilling moments of the entire film involves the protagonist sitting on a bus and suddenly panicking about who might be standing behind him. This moment too evokes a shudder precisely from what we’re not seeing and hearing: all we see is a blurred silhouette just beyond the protagonist’s shoulder and we hear nothing at all, the entire sound mix dropping into startling silence for just long enough to make you feel as though something is wrong.
This is a paranoia-inducing crime thriller like I’ve never quite seen before: one that doesn’t announce itself as one. The ostensible narrative in the film’s first half is almost mundane: a guy goes back and forth between work and home, spending all of his free time on his side hustle purchasing random items in bulk to resell on the secondhand market, desperately trying to make a little more money this week than he did the week before. When he’s not working, he spends time with his girlfriend, though they don’t seem to have much to talk about other than the things they are buying and wish they could buy. The movie is so low-stakes that it feels…quaint? But gradually and imperceptibly, this shit turns into Macbeth — if the characters of Macbeth were fighting over a high-value waifu figurine rather than the Scottish crown, that is.
The film sneaks up on you, shapeshifting so gradually that there’s no clearly defined moment when the protagonist’s business deals start feeling more like crimes. Kurosawa’s characters, driven solely by profit and personal gain, are one-dimensional to the point of feeling inhuman. It is as though the film is a coldly calculated thought exercise meant to demonstrate how the logic of capitalism can lead to nothing but cruelty — and once cruelty’s true face is exposed, Kurosawa’s trademark silence is exchanged for the deafening volume of gunshots.
Zach’s Take:
It’s easy to do evil on the internet. You don’t have to look your victims in the face.
But evil still catches up to Yoshii (Masaki Suda) in the latest thriller from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Yoshii works as a reseller — grabbing items in demand and reselling them at a marked-up price.
His friend calls it easy money and Yoshii loves money. So does his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) who talks to him about all of the things she would love to buy with lots of money. He also works at a factory as a connection to reality, but quits as soon as his boss tries to give him a promotion. Too many responsibilities.
In the background, Yoshii infuriates a good number of people by the way he makes his money online.
He never sees them, but he runs into a dead rat on his doorstep and wire blocking his scooter path that gives him pause that he might be being monitored. Once he hits it big on an item, he moves to the country with Akiko with the idea of fully focusing on his reseller business.
Kurosawa starts the movie by weaving a procedural: Yoshii identifies an item to sell, marks it up and then waits for the profits to roll in — the audience a voyeur to him waiting for the sales screen to light up with “sold.” But it bends genres by the third act, turning into much more of a thriller as those he has wronged begin to catch up with him more tangibly.
It’s punchy, gripping and a perfect edge-of-your-seat movie to offset some of the awards fare this fall.