«Cloud» Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Explores the Dark Side of E-Commerce
This Japanese thriller follows a man who makes a living selling dubious products online—until anonymous threats and attacks begin to disrupt his life.
The virtual world, as we know, has its complications. It’s an immense and often mysterious universe that people step into without fully understanding what—or who—might be on the other side. For Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a veteran Japanese filmmaker with more than two dozen films to his name, it’s fertile ground for suspense. And in Cloud, he dives into the strange, murky logic of online life to craft a tense and unsettling thriller.
The story centers on Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a young man who makes a living reselling products online. He buys odd items—sketchy healing devices, counterfeit designer handbags, dolls, and other random goods—at low prices and flips them at a profit on a specialized website. Business is going well, so he quits his job at a factory—much to the dismay of his boss, Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), who believed in his potential—and moves with his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) to a remote area, where he rents a house and sets up shop with the help of a new assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira).
But things quickly begin to spiral. Yoshii alienates potential partners, sells unreliable products, and starts clashing with both his assistant and girlfriend over his increasingly obsessive work habits. Then a rock is thrown through his window. When he reports it to the police, they suggest a possible suspect—but they’re also investigating a local counterfeit ring, and Yoshii suspects they’re onto him. That’s when the tension ramps up. He’s been making good money through his shady online dealings, but that kind of success doesn’t always come without consequences. A simple search for his alias—Ratel—on the wrong forum might be all it takes to bring trouble to his door.
The film’s title, Cloud, clearly evokes the intangible nature of digital life, but Kurosawa is interested in what happens when the virtual bleeds into the real. Yoshii sees himself as a skilled entrepreneur, but gives little thought to the dissatisfied customers on the other side of the screen. And that lack of foresight can have real-world consequences. Kurosawa doesn’t dwell in ambiguity: instead of building a slow-burning mystery, he moves quickly into thriller territory, exploring how something as simple as an angry online comment can escalate into real-life danger.
Half character study, half survival thriller, Cloud finds Kurosawa—best known for atmospheric, psychologically complex works like Cure and Pulse—leaning more into genre than existential dread. While there are a few scenes that hint at the mindset of those caught up in these digital deceptions, the film ultimately focuses on action, escape, and betrayal over introspective drama.
Online aggression doesn’t always stay in the cloud. What starts as trolling or doxxing can quickly spill into threats, harassment, and violence. Let’s hope what happens to Yoshii stays in fiction—but Kurosawa makes sure the warning lands all too close to home.
