‘Cloud’ Review: An Online Grift Has IRL Consequences in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Compellingly Wonky Thriller
variety.comJessica Kiang 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.
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