The Cinematheque

Vancouver Premiere

“Maintaining a surface tonal grimness while turning the screws on Yoshii, Cloud is nonetheless full of manic outbursts and violence whose extravagance borders on comic … That all of this is in service of a peculiar but total vision of cinema is undeniable.”

Vadim Rizov, Filmmaker Magazine

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s latest feature is a human-scaled action film that shares some DNA with two films from the director’s past. Like Pulse, this is a narrative in which the internet amplifies the effects of a collective death drive: for Yoshii (Suda Masaki, the voice of the heron in The Boy and the Heron), a margin-raising online reseller, the ​“impulse and instinct” of his own behaviour parallels and preys upon the desires of his unseen market—until a group of users notice the pattern of his grift. And like Serpent’s Path, which the director remade in France immediately following Cloud, this is a film in which vengeance, at torturous cost, is simultaneously enacted and reflected upon in arenas both virtual and all-too-real. Kurosawa keeps his distance from the fray, dispassionately tracing the way online spaces act as incubators for medieval ideas, while slowly dialling up the intensity of the story’s mythic path, which approaches the trajectory of a lawless, tragic neo-western.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“An offbeat internet-age drama that devolves into a vengeance actioner so deconstructed it’s almost existentially abstract … Kurosawa has a peculiar genius for finding strangeness—often malevolence—gathering like dust in the shadowy corners of banal modern life.”

Jessica Kiang, Variety

“A sophisticated send-up of social commerce culture … Yoshii, who has no real personality to speak of, could be the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the profit motive, while his clientele are like refugees from one of Park Chan-wook’s overwrought revenge thrillers.”

Adam Nayman, The Ringer