Director – Kiyoshi Kurosawa – 2024 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 124m
*****
The art of the deal. The past of an internet goods reseller driven by making money who has made enemies among his one-off suppliers and customers comes back to bite him – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 25th
Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) makes a take-it-or-leave it offer to Tonoyama (Masaaki Akahori), who manufactures electric therapy devices: ¥90 000 for his entire inventory. Tonoyama protests that at such a low price he will barely make any money after all the investment he has made. Tonoyama’s wife (Maho Yamada) is horrified and pleads with Yoshii, but he is ruthless. He explains that if he can’t sell the items, the ¥90 000 will ocver him to pay someone to take the unsaleable goods away. Returning home to his sometime live-in girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), Yoshii puts the items online at ¥200 000 each. They quickly sell out. He tells her she can buy whatever she wants with his credit card.
At Yoshii’s day job, in what appears to be a factory floor for the laundering of clothes, his boss Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) holds him in high regard, feeling his talents are underused as a mere shop floor worker and regarding him as a future leader. Later, when Takimoto offers him a promotion, Yoshii quits, subsequently pretending to be out when Takimoto calls at Yoshii’s apartment to talk with him. Outside of his job, Yoshii hangs out with mentor and former school acquaintance Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) who taught him all the ins and outs of internet reselling. Muraoka has stumbled onto a legitimate business opportunity and wants Yoshii to come in with him, but Yoshii turns him down.
Yoshii’s earnings allow him and Akiko to move to a less cramped, lakeside house in the country where he takes delivery of his next shipment, designer handbags, which he puts on sale online and which, again, sell out. He takes on as an assistant unemployed local resident Sano (Daiken Okudaira) who worked a while in Tokyo but returned to his home area once he realised that a career in the big city was not for him.
One evening in his new home, Yoshii hears a sound and thinks he sees someone behind the patterned glass of the windows, which obscure the image. An object is thrown through another of the windows, terrifying Akiko, who suggests returning to Tokyo. Yoshii files a report with the local policeman, who tells him he heard that Yoshii has been selling fake designer handbags. Yoshii promises to look into the matter and if possible bring the cop a handbag to inspect to verify the rumour one way or the other. Once home, however, he does nothing about this, waiting instead for the handbags to sell out – which they do. His interest lies not in honest trading, or in some way genuinely serving his customers or the wider society, but merely in making as much money for himself as possible, and as quickly as he can. He doesn’t do after sales service. Unless you count Yoshii’s tracking down the supplier who sold Yoshi the fake handbags as genuine in the first place and beating him up.
Sano, it turns out, adheres to a disciplined moral and ethical code very different from Yoshii’s money-making motivation. Sano manages to catch the local who threw the projectile through the window, threatening him to ensure it doesn’t happen again. He is interested enough in his employer’s business to search for Yoshii’s online seller name Ratel when Yoshii is out, and finds many damning and hateful reviews. Yoshii, who has never carried out a personal ego-search, is unaware of this; he is, however, furious to discover Sano has been using his computer and fires him. Sano has no interest in stealing Yoshii’s business ideas, software or customers, but is convinced Yoshi needs his services for the business to prosper or even to survive, so won’t take no for an answer and carries on working as Yoshii’s assistant. It will later become apparent that Sano worked in organised crime in Tokyo before getting out, and while he has no plans to return to that way of life, is not averse to calling in occasional favours from old contacts. He sends his regards to the chairman.
For Yoshii, Sano’s attitude will turn out to be fortuitous because various people Yoshii has walked over in the past, including Tonoyama the therapy device manufacturer Yoshii ripped off, Takimoto his former boss he turned down, and Muraoka his business mentor he also turned down, have met via an online chat forum and have got together to find him and wreak revenge. Yoshii is so absorbed in making money that he hasn’t any inkling he has done anything wrong or that he has built up a group of enemies that wish him ill. Until they come for him. Suddenly, he is escaping into the woods, but after a detour hiding out in an old shack, his obsession with his business gets the better of him. Running into the worried Akiko, instead of the two of them simply abandoning everything and driving away to safety, he returns with her to their house to load his inventory onto his van and disappear, allowing his pursuers to capture him and take him to an abandoned factory where they tie him to a chair.
Their plan for revenge: to introduce Yoshii to “a world of pain”, livestreaming on the internet their torturing and killing of him. However, Akiko is still at large and may come to his rescue. More significantly, Sano too is at large, and ‘working’ as Yoshii’s assistant will come to save him in a series of shoot-outs that could easily go wrong, and get either or both men killed at any moment…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has in recent years, dabbled in a wide variety of genres – art house travelogues, science fiction, wartime spy movies, horror thrillers, gangster thrillers, ghost stories, police procedurals and even action movies, yet he’s probably best known for two horror films Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) made during the heyday of J-horror in the latter 1990s and the earlier 2000s. Pulse, a highly effective exploitation of audience fears abut the then fledgling internet, has its echoes in his new film, but not for the reasons you might expect.
Pulse frequently speculates on the internet’s potential without really knowing what it’s talking about, something you could get away with when it was very new. What Pulse does really well, though, is unsettle the audiences to evoke dread via visual devices where people suddenly appear as terrible, unearthly presences or stains appear on walls. The internet is likewise integral to Cloud, but isn’t used in and of itself as a springboard for scaring the audience. Pulse’s dreadful shadows and apparitions are all over parts of Cloud, however, such as the moment Yoshii and Akiko talk on a bus and a silhouette gets up to get off the bus – just a passenger, or has he been listening to the conversation? – which latter idea, if true, might help explain certain events later in the narrative. The mysterious sounds and visual distortions of people when the harassment begins at the protagonists’ new lakeside house also recall various unnerving moments in Pulse.
The entrepreneurial Yoshii and his consumerist girlfriend Akiko aren’t particularly sympathetic characters – he is obsessed with making money over and above anything else, while she, a more peripheral character, appears equally obsessed with spending it, as if she only wants him for his credit cards and their purchasing power. While it’s hard to assign any kind of merit to the lowlife who claims not to know that the designer handbags he sold to Yoshii are in fact fake, other character can be seen as essentially good but corrupted by the lure of immediate easy money – a shopkeeper Yoshii persuades to part with his entire stock of sword-wielding, action girl figurines even as an army of fans queues outside the shop to buy them in an exclusive sale event can be seen as badly letting his customers down, while medical therapy device manufacturer Tonoyama has been tormented by his bad decision to sell at low cast to Yoshii ever since they agreed the deal.
The action shoot out in the final reel may be undeniably impressive, with a very strong cat and mouse element where you’re never quite sure who is going to shoot who first, but somehow the moral undercurrent underpinning the whole thing seems a greater achievement. It’s also hugely effective as a character study. Overall, this is a salutary essay on the evils of greed in the service of business. It’s also an incredible thriller that will hold you in its vicelike grip from start to finish. A highly original work and a real treat.
Cloud is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, April 25th.
Trailer: