Cloud review: A searing action thriller about our increasingly digital world

The internet has a funny way of making us feel insulated from the consequences of our actions. Anonymous user names, private browsing, digital avatars … the sheer intangibility of the virtual world can make everything that happens online feel like it’s less real.

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is deeply interested in this phenomenon, and exploring it through his work. The Japanese horror master delved into this topic in Pulse, one of the scariest horror movies of the century, in which ghosts invade the living world via the internet. He returns to that theme in a very different way with the new thriller Cloud, proclaiming once again that the internet is, in fact, real life.

Cloud follows an online reseller, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), whose shady business practices come back to bite him when frustrated past clients team up to exact revenge. Yoshii is completely oblivious to the effect his actions have on other people – his clients, his neglected girlfriend, an old friend who helped him get in this line of business – and is utterly shocked to find he has a long list of enemies enraged by how his money-seeking practices have impacted their lives.

One of Cloud’s most masterful touches is the slow build of Yoshii’s situation, as the desire to make more money completely subsumes everything else. At the beginning, he doesn’t set out to scam people, but he’s not bothered when it happens. Whether the hand bags he purchased are genuine or fake are immaterial to his goal: Sell them for more than he bought them. Eventually, Yoshii is actively screwing everyone over in the endless pursuit of more profit. The audience’s relationship to Yoshii and understanding of his business mirror his gradual descent into disregard for the consequences of his actions. At first, his business comes off as sketchy, but not completely unethical – certainly no more than big businesses who also sell items for a higher price than they buy them for. And while his depths may never be able to meet those of a multibillion corporation, by the end, his moral vacuity is impossible to ignore.