Cloud review – all-time bleak­est episode of Only Fools and Horses

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film Pulse por­trayed the still young inter­net as a means through which spir­its of the dead could trans­mute them­selves from the finite lim­its of lim­bo: break­ing into the land of the liv­ing like sta­t­ic inter­fer­ence to exac­er­bate already wide­spread alien­ation and sow seeds of destruc­tion. Near­ly 25 years lat­er, in the doom­scrolling and enshit­ti­fi­ca­tion era, the inter­net has since been con­firmed as a por­tal to hell.

Cloud is the Japan­ese mas­ter of dread’s lat­est rumi­na­tion on this idea, and is less con­cerned with super­nat­u­ral­ly-assist­ed depres­sion and more with how online iden­ti­ties and the cap­i­tal­ist grind­set have drained peo­ple of their human­i­ty. If you’ve ever wished ill towards a scalper, Kuro­sawa has the film for you. But this dark­ly com­ic thriller also skew­ers those who flirt with fan­tasies of vengeance from behind sup­posed anonymi­ty. Dox­ing can be both legit­i­mate­ly dead­ly and bla­tant­ly incom­pe­tent at the same time.

The first of Cloud​’s riv­et­ing two hours is spent com­pil­ing griev­ances and sins for the case against Yoshii (Masa­ki Suda), the film’s pro­tag­o­nist (cer­tain­ly not its hero). A young man who resells goods online under the user­name ​‘Ratel’, Yoshii pur­chas­es and hoards all man­ner of prod­ucts in bulk so that he can arti­fi­cial­ly inflate the prices to pass them on for prof­it, with lit­tle con­cern for whether cer­tain design­er items are actu­al­ly the real thing. In Cloud​’s open­ing, we see him pur­chase med­ical devices he doesn’t even under­stand from a con­found­ed cou­ple, bring­ing them to his cramped apart­ment where stacks of box­es almost ful­ly con­ceal the walls and fur­ni­ture. Say what you will about Del Boy’s busi­ness prac­tices in Only Fools and Hors­es, but at least his home main­tained a bit of cosiness.

You’d think there’d be warmth in Yoshii’s bond with girl­friend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), but her curi­ous exis­tence in this film, even when liv­ing in the same place as her lover, most­ly con­sists of ogling the more lav­ish mate­r­i­al rewards that Yoshii’s shady deal­ings bring into her orbit. Theirs is a rela­tion­ship where affec­tion is expressed sole­ly through the promise of accu­mu­lat­ing more mon­ey to spend; where the prospect of mar­riage is dis­cussed as anoth­er com­mod­i­ty, rather than any reflec­tion of devo­tion through thick and thin. Even their mov­ing in togeth­er at a spa­cious lake house rental is not born of true romance, but of Yoshii attempt­ing to hide his tracks from dis­grun­tled buyers.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, var­i­ous demons come knock­ing as Cloud deft­ly shifts into both home-inva­sion hor­ror and bleak­ly fun­ny action movie. Among the rag­tag assailants seek­ing vio­lent ret­ri­bu­tion — all losers who met online — are an expe­ri­enced dox­er who’s there just for the fun of trolling and Yoshii’s for­mer boss, who’s pre­sent­ed as anal­o­gous to an over­ly-invest­ed reply guy on social media. Play­ing like a slick­er, more vicious riff on Ben Wheatley’s Mex­i­can stand-off film, Free Fire, the cli­mac­tic gun­play chaos is all the more chill­ing for the impo­tence ulti­mate­ly behind so much of the rage being vented.

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