Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud is a film about the dehumanizing logic of internet culture. It does not notice that it is applying that logic to its own characters.
Yoshii buys cheap. He sells high. He does it across dozens of online platforms, playing sellers and buyers against each other with the cheerful amorality of someone who has decided that a transaction is not a relationship. He never meets the people he cheats. He never needs to. The internet has given him what all systems of exploitation quietly require: distance. Clean hands. A screen between himself and the consequences.
Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2024 Venice premiere, knows all of this. It has thought carefully about Yoshii, about the particular vacancy of a young man who has replaced human connection with the dopamine of the next deal, and it builds its first hour around him with the patient, slightly terrifying attention that Kurosawa has been bringing to ordinary Japanese life since Cure in 1997. Masaki Suda plays Yoshii with a flat, unreadable quality, not quite blankness but the thing just adjacent to it: a person who is present in every scene and absent from every relationship. He moves through the film like a cursor. He clicks. Things happen. He moves on.
And then the people he has wronged find each other online, and they decide to come and kill him.
What follows is one of the most discussed and debated tonal shifts in recent Japanese cinema. The slow accumulation of dread that fills the film’s first hour erupts, in its second, into something that looks considerably like an amateur action movie: clumsy, slapstick in its violence, populated by would-be killers who trip over each other and lose their nerve and shoot badly. Critics who loved Cloud called it daring. Critics who did not called it incoherent. Both camps are missing what Kurosawa is actually doing.
The people who arrive to kill Yoshii are not professionals. They are not even particularly dangerous people. They are ordinary individuals who found each other in comment sections, who amplified each other’s grievances in the particular way that online spaces allow, and who have now driven from wherever they live to enact a revenge that probably seemed more satisfying as a plan than it does as an event. They know violence from screens and games and manga. They do not know it from life. And when they attempt to bring their screen-learned scripts into physical reality, the scripts do not transfer. The chaos of the second half is not Kurosawa losing control of his film. It is Kurosawa making an argument: online radicalization, when it finally exits the digital and enters the physical, arrives as farce. Deadly farce, but farce. The internet made them furious. It did not make them competent.
This is the sharpest insight in Cloud, and the film deserves considerable credit for committing to it so fully, at such cost to its own generic coherence.
But here is what the film cannot see.
Cloud is a film about a man who treats the people he encounters as faceless and interchangeable, and it wants us to understand this as a moral failure specific to the digital economy. Yoshii is what the algorithm makes of a person when human connection is replaced by transaction. Fine. That argument is real and the film makes it with some force.
And then look at what the film does with the mob.
The avengers who come for Yoshii are barely characters. We know almost nothing about them. We do not learn their names in any way that sticks. We do not understand their lives outside the grievance. They arrive in a group and they behave as a group, which is precisely how Yoshii has always seen the people he cheats: not as individuals but as a category. The film spends its entire first hour indicting Yoshii for his failure to see the people he deals with as fully human, and then spends its second hour extending exactly that failure to the people who come to punish him for it. Kurosawa has constructed, without appearing to notice, a mirror. The film treats its mob the way Yoshii treats his customers. It becomes the dehumanizing logic it set out to examine.
“Cloud condemns a man for seeing people as faceless and interchangeable, and then refuses to give faces to the people who come to condemn him. It has built a mirror without knowing it is standing in front of one.”
| Director | Kiyoshi Kurosawa |
|---|---|
| Year | 2024 |
| Runtime | 123 minutes |
| Cast | Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira |
| Award | Venice International Film Festival 2024 (Out of Competition) |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel, MUBI |
There is one more thing the film reveals accidentally, and it has to do with Kurosawa’s own relationship to his material.
Kurosawa built his reputation on a specific kind of horror: the horror of technology as a conduit for something genuinely metaphysical. In Pulse (2001), the internet was a portal through which the dead returned. The dread was not social commentary. It was something older and more frightening: the suggestion that what we use to connect us might be opening a door we cannot close. Cloud wants to be that film. It is organized like that film. It builds atmosphere the way that film builds atmosphere. But the horror it is reaching for is purely sociological: internet bad, anonymity enables cruelty, grievance finds community online. These are true observations. They are not, however, the source of the dread that made Cure and Pulse genuinely terrifying.
The film Kurosawa wanted to make was about something that cannot be explained by economics or social media theory. The film he made is more explicable than that, and therefore less frightening. The genre rupture in the second half is not just a formal choice. It is the moment where the metaphysical dread the first hour was building toward declines to arrive, and the film substitutes action for the void. Watch the first hour again knowing this, and you can feel Kurosawa reaching for something he cannot quite find in this material.
The comparison that matters most here is Kurosawa’s own Pulse, his bleakest and most uncompromising film, and the one Cloud is most clearly trying to speak to. In Pulse, the internet genuinely does something beyond human comprehension. The loneliness it enables is not a social problem with a policy solution. It is a condition of existence that technology has made visible and irreversible. Cloud wants that weight and settles, in the end, for something considerably more explicable. Putting the two films side by side shows you not just what Cloud is but what it is still searching for.
The second comparison is Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004), an unlikely pairing that earns its place. Both films are about a man of chilling professional detachment moving through a world populated by people he does not quite see as fully real. Both films use genre mechanics to make a philosophical argument about the cost of that detachment. But Mann gives his antihero a genuine interiority, allows him to be interesting in himself rather than as a symbol. Yoshii, by contrast, remains a cursor to the end. This is a choice and possibly the right one. But it keeps Cloud at a remove that Collateral refuses.
Cloud is a genuinely interesting film made by one of cinema’s most consistently interesting directors, and it is operating at a level of formal intelligence that most thrillers do not attempt. Its central flaw is also its most revealing quality: a film about the loss of human particularity in the digital age that cannot quite bring itself to grant particularity to the people it most needs to see clearly. Kurosawa has made a film that knows what the internet does to us. He has not yet made the film about what it does to him. That film, when it arrives, might be his masterpiece.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001): what Cloud is reaching toward and cannot quite touch, the internet as genuine metaphysical horror rather than social critique.
Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997): the film that established Kurosawa’s singular capacity for dread, and the clearest measure of how far his recent work sits from that high watermark.
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