A young man with a side hustle in online reselling finds himself at the mercy of a disgruntled customer in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud,whichplayed at Manchester Film Festival 2025.
Cloud was one of my most anticipated films at Manchester Film Festival this year, and if I say I was mildly disappointed, that’s only because my Kiyoshi Kurosawa bar of expectation is set reasonably high.
Once again dipping into the online world for subject matter, Kurosawa introduces us to Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a factory worker with a sideline in online reselling. Buying cheaply in bulk, he then sells the items online at inflated prices. When one of these deals pays excellent dividends, he impulsively leaves his factory job and, taking girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) with him, rents a lakeside home in the country to expand his online business. There, he hires a young local man (Sano, played by Daiken Okudaira) to help with packing and dispatch of orders
The first half of Cloud is then something of a psychological thriller, in which a group of Yoshii’s disgruntled customers form an online community to harass, threaten and doxx him in order to take their revenge. It’s creepy at times, and suspenseful, made even more so by the feeling of numbness emanating from Yoshii, as though all the menacing incidents are just to be accepted as part of his chosen profession and online life.
The second half of the film surprisingly becomes more of a physical experience for our online reseller, and we end up watching an unexpected shoot out in an abandoned warehouse complex. It was not where I was anticipating this would go! By the end of events, Yoshii will be a changed person, but will he change his life?
I mentioned at the beginning that I felt a little disappointed by Cloud. I have a feeling that a second viewing might change my mind a little, as on first viewing, the turn which the back half took seemed to be insufficiently supported in the first half. But perhaps I missed things. I’m more inclined to think that the second half drags a little, so that the connections are too far back in the mind to make sense first time around.
Either way, this is not a bad film by any stretch; its topic (in the first half, at least) is contemporary, plausible and suspenseful. The psychological threat is creepy. I just didn’t quite fit the two halves together.
Cloud played at Manchester Film Festival (14th – 23rd March 2025).
A young man with a side hustle in online reselling finds himself at the mercy of a disgruntled customer in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, which played at Manchester Film Festival 2025.
Cloud was one of my most anticipated films at Manchester Film Festival this year, and if I say I was mildly disappointed, that’s only because my Kiyoshi Kurosawa bar of expectation is set reasonably high.
Once again dipping into the online world for subject matter, Kurosawa introduces us to Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a factory worker with a sideline in online reselling. Buying cheaply in bulk, he then sells the items online at inflated prices. When one of these deals pays excellent dividends, he impulsively leaves his factory job and, taking girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) with him, rents a lakeside home in the country to expand his online business. There, he hires a young local man (Sano, played by Daiken Okudaira) to help with packing and dispatch of orders
The first half of Cloud is then something of a psychological thriller, in which a group of Yoshii’s disgruntled customers form an online community to harass, threaten and doxx him in order to take their revenge. It’s creepy at times, and suspenseful, made even more so by the feeling of numbness emanating from Yoshii, as though all the menacing incidents are just to be accepted as part of his chosen profession and online life.
The second half of the film surprisingly becomes more of a physical experience for our online reseller, and we end up watching an unexpected shoot out in an abandoned warehouse complex. It was not where I was anticipating this would go! By the end of events, Yoshii will be a changed person, but will he change his life?
I mentioned at the beginning that I felt a little disappointed by Cloud. I have a feeling that a second viewing might change my mind a little, as on first viewing, the turn which the back half took seemed to be insufficiently supported in the first half. But perhaps I missed things. I’m more inclined to think that the second half drags a little, so that the connections are too far back in the mind to make sense first time around.
Either way, this is not a bad film by any stretch; its topic (in the first half, at least) is contemporary, plausible and suspenseful. The psychological threat is creepy. I just didn’t quite fit the two halves together.
Cloud played at Manchester Film Festival (14th – 23rd March 2025).
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