An Online Grift Has IRL Consequences in a Compellingly Wonky Thriller

Erratic, prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (“Pulse,” “Cure”) has, at his best, a peculiar genius for finding strangeness — often malevolence — gathering like dust in the shadowy corners of banal modern life. With “Cloud,” which has just been announced as Japan’s International Oscar submission, the filmmaker gives that impulse a compellingly enigmatic update, turning in an offbeat internet-age drama that devolves into a vengeance actioner so deconstructed it’s almost existentially abstract: Beckett giving it both barrels. 

The hinge between the film’s two modes is Yoshii (a terrifically watchable Masaki Suda) who also operates in a double register. In real life a competent, if disengaged menial worker in a clothing factory, online, he goes by the handle “Ratel” and runs a shady reselling racket that is his real focus and his real moneymaker. As “Cloud” begins, Yoshii is inspecting a consignment of “therapy machines” up for quick sale by their desperate manufacturer. Casually, he offers the man an amount for all 30 units that is less than what he will subsequently ask for just one — take it or leave it. The man takes it, over the protests of his indignant wife. Yoshii drives off with his boxed-up booty, advertises it that same night and watches, with the only glimmer of real pleasure we’ll ever see him display, as one by one the listings flicker from for-sale to pending to sold. In a matter of minutes, he’s made tens of thousands of dollars, but like with any gambler, his satisfaction is short-lived. The itch for the next score needs to be scratched. 

Yoshii has a girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) whose flighty materialism he indulges without ever cluing her into the real extent of his earnings. And he has an erstwhile reselling mentor in Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) whom he is rapidly outgrowing. Outwardly mild-mannered, Yoshii’s still waters may not run particularly deep, but there are undercurrents of avarice and ego roiling beneath his placid surface, and so when just after his big windfall, his boss at the factory offers him a promotion, Yoshii rather disdainfully quits instead. And when Muraoka suggests they team up on a new venture, again he demurs. Instead, Yoshii doubles down on his solo e-selling instincts and moves out of his cramped apartment into a spacious, secluded lake house that he pretends to Akiko is a lifestyle choice but is really just a bigger base of operations. He even hires local kid Sano (Daiken Okudaira) as a gofer for his expanding business, on the proviso that he never, ever touches Yoshii’s computer.

There is another reason for Yoshii’s abrupt, no-forwarding-address move. While unaware of the extent to which “Ratel”‘s aggrieved customers and shortchanged suppliers are organizing against him, a dead rat left on his doorstep and a trip wire that causes a motorbike crash let Yoshii know he’s unpopular, and in danger of being outed. But the threatening incidents follow him and Akiko to their new home. And with the authorities sniffing around Yoshii’s latest scheme involving fake designer handbags, there will be no one to turn to for protection if the attacks escalate.

And boy, do they escalate. Until this point, the drama has been loosely plausible, unfolding in a realist register enriched by DP Yasuyuki Sasaki’s classy cinematography, which makes even the most prosaic, underfurnished backdrop rich with shadow and lurking peril. But things are about to kick off, as Yoshii/Ratel’s many aggrieved associates team up, becoming a kind of collective vent for and magnifier of the frustrations of all the buyers and sellers who’ve ever been shafted by an unscrupulous middleman. It culminates in a darkly funny, low-boil multiplayer shootout — and the videogame language is appropriate, given the generic warehouse setting that might belong to any number of first-person shooters. There’s even a sequence in which Yoshii and his sole ally tag-team forward, taking cover behind a series of convenient, crumbly walls that plays like a live-action cut scene from Call of Duty.

Only in the very final stretch is there a little overreach, when an apocalyptic backdrop and some doomladen dialogue hint at a grandiosity that runs counter to the convincing smallness of the characters and their grubby motivations to date. Because despite all his spidering about on the Dark Web, Yoshii is no more a clear-cut villain than his aggressors are clear-cut victims. They all simply occupy different points on the lucky/unlucky spectrum when it comes to gaming the ruthless new economics of online life, which are much like the old economics of screwing the little guy over, only now, insulated by the anonymizing internet, you don’t have to look him in the eye. Imagine how differently we would behave if, as “Cloud” wittily fantasizes, we knew that each click of the cursor was the cocking of a loaded gun.