• クラウド (Cloud)

9/7/26 (Mon)

Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s 2024 suspense film takes a hairpin curve midway to become a very different flick.

A factory worker has a side gig as an online reseller, buying huge quantities of products on the cheap and reselling them at highly inflated prices. He has developed an inscrutable persona, showing little interest or enthusiasm even as his activities are earning him gobs of money. Working under a penname, he makes plenty of enemies along the way: he offhandedly rejects his boss’s offer of a promotion and leaves him in the lurch, turns down his mentor’s request for investment money, plays hardball with desperate sellers, and plies illegal knockoffs of brand goods (perhaps unknowingly – it doesn’t interest him to check) to irate customers. When strange occurrences happen around his home – a dead rat on the doorstep, a broken window, a strange face in the window – he moves away to an anonymous location in a wooded area outside of Tokyo with his girlfriend to avoid trouble, hiring an assistant for his growing business. But no one is anonymous for too long on the internet. He discovers that the people he mistreated have banded together online and are on the lookout for him.

It is when they find him that the tone of the film changes. The people he disparaged have brought an unlikely collection of rope, torture instruments, and rifles, pistols and other heavy weaponry. They capture him, tie him up, and are just about to light his face on fire when the gentle assistant, who we learn is a former yakuza, walks in with his own gun. The rest of the movie is a shootout in a large empty factory, where even the main character, rescued by the assistant, ends up with a gun in his hand for the first time and gets a Grace Kelly moment. In the end, only he and the assistant survive. He says as they drive off at the end, “I guess this is the way to Hell.”

The second half of the movie is disconnected from the first. It seems a copout – for one thing, where did they get the guns in this highly regulated country? Disrespect or callousness is unpleasant, for sure, and the girlfriend wasn’t wrong to leave the guy when her selfish needs aren’t met. But taking up arms for being outbargained or even ripped off turns this into a cartoon.

While exaggerated, the film in the first half does seem to be saying something about society’s frustration with the unseen forces that make our lives so unpleasant these days; I recalled the Italian-American guy who murdered the insurance executive in Manhattan in cold blood (and was lauded for it). But Kurosawa lacks imagination or nerve in turning to an American-style gun battle; he could have come up with better tactics than that given the Japanese setting. I get the irritation at resellers, vampires who extract value without adding anything along the way. This was especially evident in the sequence with the dolls, when the reseller pays the retailer an above-market price for his entire stock of high-demand dolls, knowing that monopoly control will allow him to sell them online for vastly inflated prices. That causes a virtual riot when the retailer reveals to the waiting crowd that the stock is sold out. Think of the dolls as Taylor Swift tickets and the reseller as a scalper (or Ticketmaster), and the picture perhaps becomes clearer. Buying low and selling high is the essence of capitalism, but dark manipulation by avaricious resellers, aside from the moral question, distorts the proper functioning of the markets. There is little that consumers at large can do to fight it, but the idea is that discontent will eventually build and explode, that is, the real world is eventually going to fight back – and it won’t be pretty. That first half makes a valid point about the direction of the online world.

The second half, though suspenseful and well directed, dilutes the horror of the message for the sake of a lot of blood. The assistant emerges as a Schwarzenegger-like character with impossible cool and what must have been a lot of gun training. The message as the two survivors drive away towards what looks like Emerald City was cryptic at best, though maybe the world-destroying force is supposed to be AI. In any case, the ending was a pity given the promise of the first half.

Suda Masaki (Kanbei in the director’s subsequent The Prisoner and the Samurai) was solid as the reseller, especially in his breakdown at the end. Others were efficient within the range that Kurosawa’s script allowed. The subtitles could be dodgy at times. “You’re about to enter a world of pain”, for example, is creative but not exactly what the Japanese was saying. I wish filmmakers would have stronger checks on these things.

The film has interesting ideas but sacrifices plausibility, even in a suspense film context, for Hollywood. A shame.