Cloud | Japanese Film Festival 2025

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https://japanesefilmfestival.net/film/cloud/

Date Reviewed: 04/12/2025

Every year, all countries outside of the Unites States, are invited to submit a film to the academy, to be in the running to win the Best International Feature Film Academy Award. Last year, Japan’s submission was Cloud. The plot of Cloud includes shady business deals, organized crime, back-stabbing, revenge, a home invasion, kidnapping, torture, murder, and a cat-and-mouse chase. With these plot points and its status, as arguably Japan’s best movie of the year; I went into the movie more excited than I was to watch Basic Instinct 2 back in the day. While the end result did not match my enthusiasm, it did a better job than Sharon Stone’s misstep.

Cloud focuses on Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) who buys goods of varying quality and then re-sells them on-line at a considerable mark-up. But he is living on the edge both in terms of his available bank balance to make his next bulk stock purchase, and also the amount of dissatisfied on-line customers that will potentially revolt against him. These people previously made purchases of knock-off goods, and are building a crew to seek retribution. These cats look do more than just leaving negative feedback on his eBay seller account.

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is known for his crime thrillers (Cure, Serpent’s Path, Retribution), so he is right in his wheelhouse here with Cloud’s subject matter. Being both writer and director, there is no misinterpretation of the material. It looks good with both the visuals and sound working well. So why is this not the classic it had the potential to be?

The film is in two clear halves – the build-up and the action phase. And both phases have issues. The slower pacing of the first half is ok, if there is enough meat on the bone. But the issue with the slow build-up here is that there is not enough background to justify the antagonist’s motives. A relatively anonymous group of villains can work if the viewer is invested in the protagonist coming out on top. But the issue here is that the protagonist and his close contacts are all unlikeable. So now we have a group of villains that we don’t know enough about, and a hero that we are not convinced that we want to see win.

Once we hit the action phase, things ramp up. There are multiple scenarios that provide ample opportunity to show our hero succeed via smarts, physicality, or ruthlessness. But he mostly slips out of each of these situations through either good fortune or inept planning from the villain group. And while this appears to be a deliberate choice by Kurosawa, I don’t think it assists in elevating viewing satisfaction. Here is where the movie fails against something like the similarly themed Norwegian movie, Headhunters.

Masaki Suda delivers a believable performance as Yoshii. Essentially an everyday man caught is a dangerous situation. This is relatable for the average viewer, and therefore, arguably a character choice that works. But with a character experienced in this business, you would expect him to have more awareness and understanding of the dangers of the world he operates in. But this seems more of an issue with how the character is written, rather than how it is performed. The rest of the cast are unexceptional, except for Amane Okayama as Miyake. Playing a weak and desperate pawn in this criminal world, he delivers the best performance of the film and gives the viewer some insight into the lives of the antagonists.

While this review has gone into detail on some of the negatives, the movie is actually good overall. The story and set pieces are exciting, it leaves us with some memorable visuals, and it is unpredictable. The negative comments stem more from the disappointment on the "classic" the movie could have been, rather than the solid movie it ended up being. 

Reviewed by Dion Gaunt