What would online life be like if actions had consequences like they do in the real world? That seems to be the motivating energy behind Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud (Kuraudo), an overlong but fascinating thriller yanking a thread that’s visible from the start, though it takes a while to realise that it’s there.
Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) has a traditional job in a factory making stuff. His boss likes him and wants to promote him, setting him off on a safe, decent and traditional career. But there is more to Yoshii’s life than the day job. He also has a side hustle buying distressed goods at knockdown prices and selling them online for a packet. Sometimes, we learn much later on, the goods are not always as described.
However, that’s all in the future and, much as our online and offline lives don’t entirely overlap, we don’t fully understand this about Yoshii until much further down the line, after he’s persuaded his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) to quit her job and go into business with him in a rural backwater, where he also hires a local lad, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), as a gopher.
Sano is a younger man and, this being the way of things, more tech-savvy than Yoshii. He soon works out that everything is not 100% kosher in Yoshii’s operation. But it’s when strange interventions start happening that Sano fully realises what’s afoot. Turns out a campaign has been got together by an online gang of unhappy customers, who have decided to crowdfund an intervention designed to bring down “Ratet”, as Yoshii’s online avatar is called.
With heavies suddenly turning up unannounced, and Yoshii going on the run, a traditional chase thriller, of sorts, starts to play out. It’s one with noirish overtones, especially when, in femme fatale style, Akiko attempts to seduce Sano. Kurosawa can’t go the whole hog though. The different logics of the online and offline spheres still apply and this online gang’s interventions in the real world are sporadic and not easy to organise. “Ratet” lives out in the boonies, the gang members all have jobs etc, and actual appearances in Yoshii’s real world take planning and boots on the ground.
It’s a genuinely interesting idea. What if that stupid thing you wrote on X last week earned you a punch in the face? What keeps us inline out here in the offline world? What if the same strictures – coercion, in a nutshell – applied to online interactions?
At one point the bad guys threaten to burn the soles of Yoshii’s feet, a form of direct intervention lifted straight from the realm of medieval torture – you don’t get gnarlier and more real than that.
It’s an updated Aesop’s Fable, really, with a clear moral message and a warning about the consequences of shitty behaviour. Kurosawa shoots it all in muted colours, and keeps everything on the downlow, with Suda playing Yoshii as a man it would be easier to like if we were given more access to him. We’re obviously not meant to like him. Nor, for that matter, are we meant to like Akiko either, a young woman far too easily lured by the promise of “stuff”, and by the prettiness of Sano, when he turns up in her life.
We’re with Sano – young, smart, a smalltown boy who is nevertheless properly connected to the globalised online world and yet remains uncorrupted, unlike Yoshii, who’s fallen into the rabbit hole, swallowed whichever pill it is you’re not meant to swallow etc.
What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul. Jesus got it down in a line, whereas Kurosawa goes on considerably longer than that and a fair few minutes before he brings the curtain down you might find yourself muttering, OK, I get it, I get it. Good story, though.
Cloud – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
