Cloud

Imagine living as an anonymous online scammer, hustling every day within the logic of digital platforms, manufacturing artificial scarcity as a way of life. Your entire existence is built on deception, on manipulating both the value of things and the feelings of other people. You profit from their anxiety and desire for an object. In that situation, who could you possibly trust? Who could you trust in the ordinary rhythm of your life, while you hoard goods and perform as a kind of e-commerce scalper for the circulation of tertiary commodities? This is the question that continues to haunt Ryosuke Yoshii, the protagonist of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s aptly titled film, Cloud (2024).

There is a tension between trust and control within Yoshii that makes him suspicious of everything. In the paranoid world he inhabits, in the margins of what economist Vili Lehdonvirta has described as a “cloud empires”, Yoshii has found a way to survive alongside his menial day job folding clothes. This condition forces him constantly to question whether he can trust anyone at all: his girlfriend, his former superior, everyone he encounters in the course of his daily life. In the end, he trusts only himself—a self that acts without ever seriously considering the consequences of what it does. Yet those actions amount to a time bomb in an online world saturated with anonymous communication and mob mentality.

In speaking about trust, Kurosawa seems once again to return to his own suspicion of technology, especially the internet. If in the early 2000s he evoked a distinctly technophobic atmosphere around Web 1.0 in the horror film Pulse (2001), then in Cloud he updates that suspicion for the age of post-Web 2.0 technology—digital platforms and social media—where social friction is ignited and profited from by the very logic of platform capitalism. In Kurosawa’s view, technology is not merely an extension of the human senses, nor simply a medium, but a form of dehumanisation and an entry point into apocalyptic disorder. One can see this in the way both Pulse and Cloud end on a nihilistic note regarding the futures of their characters.

As a reseller and hoarder, Yoshii quite literally depends on platforms for his livelihood and his survival. Within the architecture of platform capitalism on the internet, seller and customer are separated by the mediation of the platform, so that whatever one acquires online never fully reveals its source, even if direct interaction between the parties remains possible within the platform itself. Once such platforms become spaces in which resellers mark up prices or deal in uncertain goods, anonymity naturally comes to the fore as part of the rules of dirty play online. After operating in the shadows for so long, Yoshii eventually has to reckon with those he has deceived, who step beyond the screen to seek him in person. This time, he must face the material manifestations of social media’s potential for horror and collective rage, from doxxing to attempted murder, at the hands of an anonymous mob.

What is curiously striking about Cloud is the disappearance of the platform as a mediator once all hell breaks loose. After a prolonged slow burn around the mechanisms and economics of the platform itself, we are suddenly thrown into the reality of how petty criminality and disaffection can culminate in vigilantism, staged like a North American thriller or revenge film from the 1970s, complete with autumnal tones, a lakeside house, and a heavy atmosphere of home invasiona departure from the more atmospheric conventions of Asian horror. Inevitably, one is reminded of films with similar settings, from Straw Dogs (1971) to its echoes of Canuxploitation, such as films like Death Weekend (1976). Cloud is also the first time I have seen Kurosawa execute action set pieces that feel genuinely gripping, using a realist camera style full of slight, nervous tremors.

Beyond the digital platform and all its capitalist intrigues, Cloud is equally marked by the anonymity that clings to each of its characters. Nearly everyone Kurosawa has written into the film lacks a rigid or fully legible motivation; they appear instead as vague, cryptic figures, without clear backstories or goals that might justify their actions, almost as though they are imitations of the reactionary behaviour of internet users. Their presence conveys just how chaotic and anxiety-ridden interaction in anonymous digital space has become. In the context of post-pandemic, post-Olympic Japan, shaped so deeply by precarity and social incohesion, these characters have no choice to emerge as fully coherent; they have to exist within anonymity’s logic. And this is precisely what Kurosawa exposes in Cloud with such precision.

A quarter of a century after Pulse was first released, Kurosawa still seems unable to place his faith in the idea of a technological future. Yet this is not necessarily a bad thing. With his curious ability to grasp how technology continues to function as a pharmakon—both cure and poison—within human life, and to reflect this through the codes of a genre cinema steeped in mystery, I remain eager to see how he will respond to whatever comes next: perhaps Web 3.0, Web 4.0, Web 5.0, and beyond.