A computer screen is a mirror, a conduit, a threshold, and a void. We peer into them for work, insight, entertainment, communication, companionship, and we peer for so long that the outside world comes to seem like an addendum, an antechamber of the vision granted by the screen. “The internet has many potentials,” says the Japanese master filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, “and one of them is this ability to amplify what’s inside us.” Any desire, impulse, resentment, or prejudice: Like the characters in those myths of self-obsession told around the world, we gaze into our reflection, and disappear.
In his new film Cloud, those who touch this void become it, a game of annihilation where everyone loses. At the start, Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is hustling a small business owner for the last of his merchandise. The man has a sob story—he invented a medical device and went bankrupt—but Yoshii isn’t interested. He pays bottom dollar for the last of the inventory, and packs them into a rental truck.
Our hero makes minimal money in a factory, feeding dirty clothes into a laundry press. When his boss Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) offers Yoshii a promotion, he turns it down. He doesn’t want to rise in the system; he wants to go it alone. Back in the one-room Tokyo apartment he shares, sometimes, with his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), Yoshii transforms into “Ratel,” a pseudonymous gray-market reseller, scalping video games, handbags, custom-made Idol figurines, and those “miracle medical devices” on semi-legal sites. When cuddling with Akiko or catching up with an old friend from trade school, he performs the role of passive blank, likely to smile and nod and divulge nothing about himself. Yet when staring at Ratel’s page as he waits for a sale to come through, Yoshii’s eyes fill with desire, turned on by the prospect of ripping someone else off. The image is simple—a man sitting silently in the center of a room—but also deeply unsettling, for when Kurosawa reverses this, predator is revealed as prey, his identity fading to little more than a blurred-out head and a gleaming white screen.
On the nose, sure, but Kurosawa has long trafficked in a mixture of under- and overstatement. He stages big genre premises—a detective stalking a hypnotic serial killer, ghosts invading our world through the internet—from a short distance. His figures are typically small, isolated in shots of rotted factories and quiet sidestreets so wide you can barely make out their faces, and almost always lonely, trapped within a social role—parent, housewife, salaryman, police officer—which barely restrains a violent churn of rage and despair. He prefers apocalyptic stories, yet his characters rarely recognize that their world has already ended, because on the surface, life proceeds the same as ever.
The result is a kind of deadpan insanity, where chaos is delivered with a calm look and a cold smile. Cloud takes place in a seemingly placid reality, yet derangement gradually leaks in. A newspaper-wrapped rat carcass is left on the apartment steps. Someone sets up a metal tripwire to catch Yoshii on his motor scooter. Takimoto stops by in the middle of the night, rings the doorbell, and stands immobile on the doorstep. This is a world out of balance, where strangers loom over your shoulder and the bus drives so fast it shakes the camera. Kurosawa will introduce the viewer to a clean and orderly space, and when he shows it to us again, every surface has been covered with empty takeout boxes and used drink cans and huge balls of rotted trash stuffed into stained plastic bags. The shift is so dramatic, and the content so filthy, that you expect someone, anyone, to react. Yet no one comments on it, because no one notices. For them, this is just life.
Kurosawa has been making films for over 40 years. Beginning with 1983’s Kandagawa Pervert Wars, he spent more than a decade as a journeyman, working first in softcore porn then no-budget yakuza flicks, and eventually in horror. Across his career, he’s made hangout movies and travelogues and surprisingly sweet science-fiction. Kurosawa broke out internationally with 1997’s Cure, a slow-motion serial killer film about a world so inundated with latent violence that murder can be prompted via unconscious suggestion. Yet unlike international depravity exhibitions both low- and highbrow, Cure doesn’t keep evil at arm’s length. It infects the viewer through a process of slow deterioration and subconscious suggestion; like one of the film’s many vacant alleyways and decrepit corridors, it connects you to evil by the back door.
Kurosawa’s filmography is full of precisely such peripheral spaces, traffic intersections, and digital interfaces. In his signature shot, a person stands silently, just visible, in a room that is dark, but not entirely. We can sometimes identify them, but their expression fades, their individuality disappears, and the lines between the physical and the hallucinated—the seen and the suggested—blur. You cross thresholds and transition into a neighboring but altogether more unnerving reality. Excluding 2020’s Wife of a Spy, Kurosawa makes films about the present. The internet which connects our world with the dead in 2001’s Pulse is a dial-up creation; both spirits and modems scream out with a digitally compressed agony, trapped together in an eternal digital afterlife.
This loneliness is existential but also social. In his preference for moldy apartments and rusted-out industrial spaces, Kurosawa maps the shifts of Japanese society through the end of the 20th century and the turbulence of the 21st. After a period of sustained post-war recovery and a decade of overheated, overcapitalized growth, the Japanese economy crashed hard in the 1990s, leaving behind the hollow factories and rusted storage yards that are all over Kurosawa’s filmography. This was the decade of hikikomori shut-ins and office workers literally working themselves to death. Yet even this form of lifetime employment at a family-owned firm, portrayed as a suffocating burden in films like Masayuki Suo's Shall We Dance?, began to fail, releasing otherwise talentless salarymen into the labor pool, and forcing others to question their social role.
Ryūhei Sasaki, the laid-off middle manager in 2008’s Tokyo Sonata, cannot even list his own skills or describe himself as a person. He has so little self apart from his roles as worker and father that he goes on performing them, putting on a suit and tie to eat free food with the homeless and acting the role of responsible patriarch when he returns for dinner. He cannot find a new job and will not accept a demotion, and so he finds himself trapped. Ryūhei is not the only one. Late in the film, a criminal invades the home, ransacking the building and taking wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) as a hostage. Yet when given a chance to escape, Megumi chooses her kidnapper. “How wonderful it would be if my whole life so far turns out to have been a dream,” she admits, “and suddenly I wake up and I’m someone else entirely.”
For Kurosawa, true escape—from social responsibility, self-knowledge, and moral consequence—is ultimately impossible. Though superficially a melodrama, the tone of Tokyo Sonata is much closer to a psychological thriller. He has compassion for his characters, but not empathy. Straitjacketed within their social and familial roles, the Sasakis can only express themselves through easily disproved lies and facial muscles that ripple during a nightmare. In the films of David Cronenberg, psychological evolution expresses itself through physical transformation, in all those grotesque appendages that externalize what has already changed below the surface. For Kurosawa’s characters, the mental and social strictures are simply too strong; no matter how deeply they have been transformed on the inside, they go on living their lives as if nothing has changed, incapable of articulating this shift in conscious or corporeal terms. Their professional identity, their familial role, even their private personality erect a containing wall around their deeply unstable self. But these protections become their own prison; whether the dam holds or collapses, no one survives. When it turns out that the pair’s adolescent son is a piano prodigy, the effect isn’t uplift but horror at the thought of a precocious genius suffocated by a family too insensate to recognize it.
Across his career, Kurosawa has dramatized this repressive-explosive dynamic in yakuza films, detective stories, and tales of supernatural horror. Wife of a Spy locates the origin point in the crimes of Japanese imperialism, precisely the kind of widely known but still unacknowledged atrocity roiling everywhere beneath the placid surface of his films. Yet there is always a pathway out, a conduit up from the subconsciousness, that allows this existential pollution to leach out from its poorly repressed superfund site in the subconscious until it has contaminated the world and we can no longer tell the healthy from the sick. Pulse’s grainy web-cam data loops might be ghosts or simply the byproducts of an obscenely lonesome society. Cure’s wandering amnesiac does not have to kill anyone; without a self of his own, he draws the petty rage and constitutive insecurity out of others and lets them do the rest. This hollow man turns out to be a black mirror, and he proves such an able missionary for his annihilation ritual because the people around him are also searching for the void.
Cloud is one of three films Kurosawa has released in the last year, all of which deal with individuals coming invisibly unhinged in the midst of seemingly typical realities. In a French-language remake of Kurosawa’s own 1998 film Serpent’s Path, a bereft father and expat Japanese physician kidnap and kill their way inside of a shadowy organization which might or might not be trafficking children for their organs. For all the convolutions of the plot, the true twists are all mental, a series of lies and stories which deny the viewer solid ground, manipulating us as the plotters manipulate one another. Which details are deceptions, and which are truths violently unearthed—these are questions which do not end with the film. Chime compresses Kurosawa’s career-long concerns into an abstract 45 minutes, linking up a network of visual and auditory hallucinations into a portrait of a family fundamentally alienated from itself to the point of extermination, an apocalypse in miniature. It’s pitch-perfect.
Kurosawa also speed-runs these many modes across the opening chunk of Cloud, showing us darkened rooms, grimy factory floors, cramped apartments washed out by the glow of a computer monitor. At about the midpoint, the film opens up, moving Yoshii and Akiko to the countryside, where he hopes to expand his reselling business and she can play the part of a housewife. They become the target of local youths, who resent the ease with which Tokyo money clogs up their rural economy. The police try to shake Yoshii down over counterfeit merchandise, and a strange local boy, hired as an assistant by the reseller, begins to take too much of an interest in Ratel’s business.
Per his title, Kurosawa locates a deeper threat in the free-floating, anonymous associations of online life. No less isolated and demented than Pulse’s supernatural shut-ins, this collection of keyboard warriors and virtual vigilantes begin to seek him out, emerging from their suburban homes and squalid hidey-holes. They want to kill him, but first they want to humiliate him, livestreaming this death-by-doxxing to interested parties across the web.
Like the snuff-film junkies in Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, their transgressions only thrill because others know what they’re up to. Ratel at least ships physical merchandise; their currency is entirely theoretical, enriched only when someone else is immiserated. Several of Ratel’s persecutors have no connection to him at all, but having killed before, they’ve developed a taste for it. Like reply guys swarming an embattled account, they’re happy to assist anyone seeking maximum retribution for their petty resentments.
This cashes out in a kind of capitalist battle royale, pitting the internet entrepreneur against corporate drones, family business owners, and startup tech bros, with a comic assist from organized crime. The film ends with an extended shoot-out, a feat in a nation where very few can legally own a gun. The gunplay grows deadening over time, and takes on the slow-motion corrosion of trench warfare. But this action movie lacks a hero, much as Yoshii lacks any reason beyond self-preservation to fight on. In a final bit of prophetic overstatement, Yoshii and his assistant drive into a blatantly artificial sunset, vivid and blood-colored, a symbolic but also very literal portal to hell. He has spent the whole movie peering into a world where nothing, not love or money or even death, is real until it happens on the computer. Look into Kurosawa’s mirror. What do you see?
