Cloud

Viewed as the concluding chapter of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's unusually action-packed 2024, Cloud takes on a note of summation, as if the writer-director had set himself the task of combining the queasy, thwarted machismo coursing through Chime with the stark, neutron bomb-level alienation seen in Serpent's Path. Masaki Suda plays Yoshii, an internet scalper who sips at water and seemingly takes all of his other nourishment in the form of digital fleecing. Yoshii is completely absorbed in this work, his flat crammed with metal shelving and bursting with cardboard boxes. Product flows in and then out; reduced to clear if the police begin making inquiries. There is very obviously a kind of discipline to Yoshii's scamming though. His less successful peers are packed into similarly cramped spaces but they all drown in convenience store refuse, the instant spoils of their ill-gotten gains. Comparatively, and although he somewhat cohabits with a woman he hasn't the slightest interest in touching, Yoshii is unusually frugal, viewing each successive windfall as a way to expand into his next swindle. 

After a particularly lucrative investment in an antwacky wellness device, Yoshii browses an off-brand Amazon for video games. Not to purchase them in the singular and enjoy the app for himself you understand, Yoshii instead plans to scoop up as much of a vanishing supply as possible then hold other, less plugged-in buyers to ransom. Yoshii is so absorbed in the bland rhythms of his work that he doesn't really take the time to disentangle the stray acts of hostility that he is beginning to encounter. The sodden rat wrapped in newspaper and left on his doorstep or the steel wire that someone has tied between two posts on his scooter route home. He may recognise in these incidents a pressing need to flee Tokyo but he doesn't stop to truly consider if there is organisation or planning behind these escalating attacks. Here Cloud dabbles in the mechanics of urban horror, specifically the shared kind of hypnosis we saw in Chime that compels half a dozen men, of varying age, to break with their social programming to violently pursue Yoshii across the country. Although this gang's motivations vary wildly - from a workplace snub or unrequited crush to indirectly landing one dud in trouble with a criminal gang - they all willingly burn their lives down to intimidate a nonentity who posts out counterfeit handbags.