CLOUD (2024)
This review contains spoilers.
The first half of this is a measured, slow-burning piece of masterful suspense filmmaking. But then there's the second half.
Here's the setup: our protagonist, Ryosuke Yoshii, acts as a kind of transfer node in the capitalist system, buying up various artifacts in bulk in order to flip them later. It doesn't matter what the items are, and, furthermore, it doesn't matter whether they're real or fake (he has a set of bags which he knows will sell regardless of their authenticity or provenance) or even really whether they're desirable: he negotiates with equal fervor for items that are obviously "hot" (collectible figurines on the eve of their release date) and ones that are undeniably "cold" (a stockpile of medical devices on the cusp of being junked). It genuinely doesn't matter. All Yoshii needs to do is convert these items to the right number—the price the market will pay—and the profits will flow.
It's capitalist abstraction at its finest, and Kurosawa establishes a brilliant visual grammar for this, packing everything into identical cardboard boxes that crowd Yoshii's space (and the visual field of the film). The more Yoshii thumbs his nose at the particularity and detail of the things he handles, the more he seems to be renouncing the world, leading him to go so far as to server ties with an old friend and a kindly employer. But for Kurosawa, getting out of sync with the world always has its consequences, and when things begin to go wrong—subtly at first, but in increasingly pronounced ways—we feel a rising sense of dread, but also a sort of ominous moral satisfaction, a feeling that Yoshii might have earned whatever punishment is coming his way.
But then the film makes a series of disastrous missteps, throwing all of this aside and morphing into an action caper, complete with a home invasion, a breathless pursuit through the woods, and an extended shootout in a disused factory. People Yoshii has encountered in the first half of the film get reshuffled into the narrative, resurfacing now as gun-toting antagonists (or, bizarrely, as a devoted bodyguard). The moral calculus carefully set up by the first half gets crassly steamrolled here: it's as if A Christmas Carol progressed not with Scrooge being visited by three ghosts, but rather with him being visited by a mob of angry Londoners dead-set on burning him alive. I guess it's not so strange for a film made in 2024 to make the case that, like, "the internet is making all of us crazy, including people who might formerly have served as society's moral backbone, and we're all heading into literal hell"—but it does seem like a squandering of the more nuanced tale of karmic retribution that the film spends its first hour setting up.
If this is intended as a rug-pull of sorts, OK--but to me it felt more like the film was badly losing its sense of tonal control. This impression wasn't helped along by the preponderance of "why is this happening" / "this doesn't make sense"-type dialogue at the point where the film changes tenor (I feel like if you have to have a character say something like that more than once, you may have a problem with whatever confusing thing your script is doing.) It's worth mentioning, though, that if you can recalibrate, the latter half isn't totally a loss: Kurosawa makes a surprisingly competent action director, and the gunplay of the final reel is well-paced, clearly staged, effectively shot, and thrilling at times. But I could only appreciate this as sort of a consolation prize, some violence to pass the time in the wreckage left behind once the train has gone fully off the rails.
jbushnell
