“Hell is ready for you. I’ll be your nightmare endlessly,” Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is instructed at gunpoint in one of the thrilling sequences of Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s profession in “Cloud.”
It’s a line, although, that would apply throughout the Japanese filmmaker’s work, whether or not the specters within the machine stalking a post-Y2K digital realm in “Pulse” or the elusive serial killer who appears to function by hypnosis in “Remedy,” one of many highest horror films ever made.
“Cloud” is Kurosawa’s first film to weld his techno anxieties to a Western framework, as his film a few sociopath-adjacent web reseller and hoarder culminates in what I wouldn’t fairly name a wonderful shootout, however definitely the grandest motion set piece but from the filmmaker. “Cloud” is out in U.S. theaters from Sideshow/Janus Movies on July 18, and IndieWire shares the unique trailer beneath.
Suda, who voiced the heron within the Japanese model of Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron,” leads “Cloud,” which was Japan’s submission for the 2025 Worldwide Characteristic Oscar, premiered at Venice 2024, and can subsequent play the Japan Cuts pageant in New York Metropolis. Per the distributors’ synopsis, the movie follows “an formidable, but directionless, younger manufacturing unit employee from Tokyo who facet hustles within the murky realm of black market reselling, dishonest patrons and sellers alike. After swindling his means into a great deal of money, Yoshii progressively makes an attempt to disconnect from humanity, transferring out of the town, shunning his girlfriend, and entrusting duties to his new, devoted assistant. Earlier than lengthy, his life is tormented by a sequence of mysterious, sinister incidents that threaten to upend his success and convey a few most violent demise. A grasp of fastidiously simmering stress to a bloody crescendo, Kurosawa delivers a searing portrait of digital greed and vengeance.”
So sure, motion thriller components or not, it is a Kurosawa film by means of and thru. He’s finest identified for his horror films — and you should monitor down his NFT-only 2024 brief “Chime,” about an impassive culinary arts trainer haunted by a disembodied buzzing noise — however he’s mastered different genres, just like the romantic melodrama “Journey to the Shore” or the sprawling household drama with “Tokyo Sonata,” each Cannes winners.
Like most Kurosawa characters, Yoshii isn’t snug with a lifetime of “typical happiness,” as described by a senior colleague on the manufacturing unit (Masataka Kubota). He blows up his life in tragicomic Coens-esque vogue, main his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), when requested why she’s transferring out by Yoshii’s assistant, “Inform him I used to be fucking bored.”
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich additionally raved about “Cloud” circa Venice final 12 months, writing, “‘Cloud’ updates the filmmaker’s signature focus for a contemporary world that’s enmeshed in an infinite (however invisible) community of small cruelties and bitter grievances — a community so ubiquitous that even the higher angels of our nature may drive us straight into hell. Virtually too mundane to care about till it turns into unattainable to cease waiting for a lot the identical cause, this riveting and extremely uncommon shoot-em-up finds Kurosawa returning to his roots, solely to find that psychological terror isn’t fairly as summary because it was.”
Elsewhere, this 12 months’s Janus slate has included Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia,” David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” and Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides.” Developing are Ira Sachs’ “Peter Hujar’s Day,” Bi Gan’s “Resurrection,” Lav Diaz’s “Magellan,” and Hlynur Pálmuson’s “The Love That Stays.”
Watch the trailer for “Cloud,” an IndieWire unique, beneath.
