The “internet horror” film has made inroads as a viable sub-genre, but never completely clicked, to risk a double entendre.
You can think back to a goofily-titled teen-oriented film like FeardotCom (William Malone, 2002), the somewhat innovative screen life exercise Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) or even the misbegotten Jason Reitman prestige title Men, Women and Children (2014), and see evidence that filmmakers have never truly cracked how to visualise or dramatise our fears about online life.
One of the best and most original attempts was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s canonical 2001 work Pulse, a nervous fugue of a film that followed ghosts who communicate with the living through the internet (it’s less goofy than it sounds). His latest film Cloud (2024) — playing out of competition — feels like its twenty-years-later companion piece, taking into account how the internet has evolved in those decades from a mysterious and amorphous threat to something powering the worst of modern capitalism.
Ryosuke (Japanese actor and singer Masaki Suda)) is an industrial laundromat worker yearning for something far better, eventually succeeding in his spare time through reselling desirable consumer goods as an online sole trader.
Ryosuke (whose forename, with Kurosawa’s self-penned script, I take as a good-humoured reference to his superstar protégé Ryusuke Hamaguchi) is also one of the director’s trademark ne’er-do-wells, a creepy and afflicted young-ish man clinging to the edge of society, yet never an identifiable anti-hero figure. With support from his materialistic and more aspirational girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), he suddenly quits his stable job to make a bigger go at price-inflated reselling, with a new, spacious headquarters outside of Tokyo; embracing not an illegal profession but certainly an unethical one.
With a growing slate of bad notices on consumer websites, his unsatisfied customers put together a depths-of-Reddit-style coordinated doxing campaign, and soon Ryosuke is cornered helplessly in his ominously designed workspace-cum-living space.
Kurosawa’s features typically exceed two hours. Here he employs that extended time to turn Cloud into a siege-then-hostage flick. While an enjoyable novelty, he doesn’t master the shift as well as his usual slow-drip paranoia and entropic narrative flow.
Cloud is one of three movies Kurosawa has premiered this year, the first being the excellent featurette Chime at Berlin, with the iffy-looking French language Serpent’s Path to come very soon at San Sebastián. It can be cherished as the latest variation on his motifs of entrapment and the paranormal for longtime fans, and one of his most accessible for curious newcomers to his eerie fold.
David has pursued film criticism for almost his entire adult life, and ain't tired of it yet.