The fact that Kiyoshi Kurosawa made two of the most beloved J-horror classics – Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) – has not worked in his favour. These two classics have thrown a looming shadow over him that doesn’t seem to fade. Whatever Kurosawa does, whatever genre he explores, the spectator always seeks to evaluate his other work against those two monumental filmic experiences. However, by utilizing those classics as a kind of benchmark, the spectator runs to risk in treating other works of Kurosawa unfairly, lamenting on what these films aren’t while wilfully remaining blind to how the director’s newer work expresses subtle evolutions in his creative vision and progress in his elaboration of his thematical preoccupations.

One must consider Kurosawa’s latest film, Cloud, a thriller-action-drama sprinkled with horror elements, as a product of Kurosawa’s maturation, the result of continuously working-through and revisiting the themes that structure his oeuvre. With Cloud, Kurosawa delivers a risky experiment that seeks to instrumentalize the spectator’s alienation with respect to the characters to confront him with the detrimental effects of the capitalistic discourse on the subject and his relation to others.      

Kurosawa’s narrative follows Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a factory worker who moonlights as an online reseller. One day, he earns big money when the miraculous therapy devices he ripped off a supplier sell out in no time. Not much later, his boss at the factory, Ichiro Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), approaches him to force him to accept a promotion – it would be a waste to utilize him merely as a rank-and-file worker. Takimoto does not only refuse Takimoto’s proposal, but decides to invest more time into his conniving reselling business andresign his job.

Together his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), Ryosuke moves into a large house outside Tokyo, a building that can double as office and warehouse. He even hires an assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), to smoothen the flow of his business. Yet, not long after moving in, someone throws a window in and the police is tipped of concerning the fake goods he is selling.

Kurosawa takes, first and foremost, the time to sketch out the impact of the capitalistic and consumerist logic on the main characters – Akiko and Ryosuke – and the way they interact with others. Both are introduced as victims of the capitalistic system, of the cycle of producing profit and consuming pleasure.

The spectator, being attentive to what Akiko’s enunciations imply concerning her logic, will have no problem in discerning the dynamic that guides her presence within the societal field. She delineates the guiding principle of continuous consumption by refusing to move in with Ryosuke because there is no space for all her stuff and by playfully stating that she’ll “buy this and that,” because “there’s so much (…) [she] want[s]”. Her wish to quit her job when Ryosuke’s business takes off, on the other hand, signals her dream to become a ‘pure’ consumer of pleasure. It is, therefore, not surprising that, later in the narrative, we discover that she cannot bear boredom – she needs a rhythm of pleasurable stimulation, be it from consuming gadgets or from sexual interactions.    

Ryosuke, on the other hand, is established within Cloud as a subject who wants to exploit and profit from subjects who adhere to the capitalistically-induced demand for continuous consumption and willingly indulge in concatenating gadgets-of-pleasure to temporarily cover up the gap of desire. Ryosuke is, to put it bluntly, a prisoner of the logic of reselling and scamming. He has sabotaged his desire by accepting the mere generation of profit as its aim, rendering himself unable to acknowledge the Other’s subjectivity.

Takimoto, upon hearing Yoshii’s decision to quit, tells him not to fall victim to the wish to be happier than others, a wish seducing subjects to undertake risky acts of societal ‘gambling’. However, one can only truly grasp what the signifier happiness signifies by associating this signifier with the enunciations and action of Ryosuke and Akiko. Following this associative patterns, one can only conclude that Cloud re-affirms the idea that, within contemporary Japanese society, happiness is mistakenly equated with one’s ability to spend money and consume pleasure (General-note 1). This idea concerning the capitalistic and consumerist societal field is corroborated by the way Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), Ryosuke’s senior from vocational school and fellow reseller, tries to convince him to invest in his new online auction platform startup. His whole discourse is organized around the signifier ‘money’ and the idea that the ease of life is directly associated with the accumulation of wealth.  

After firmly establishing the guiding principles of his main characters, Kurosawa overthrows the tranquil tinge of his narrative by introducing a darkish human shape lurking around Ryosuke. The simple insertion of such lingering shape imbues many visual and auditive elements with a forbidding quality and infuses an unerasable and unescapable sense of disquietedness into the film’s atmosphere. The reason why this darkish shape attains such oppressive and intrusive quality for Ryosuke – and the spectator – is simply because its presence stains the mundane, it perforates the mundane as a gaze, as a desire that remains radically opaque: what does it want from me? Nothing is more disconcerting that being unable to phantasmatically define one’s identity is in the eye of the desiring Other.

For the spectator, it soon becomes apparent that the appearance of this shadowy stain within the frame is a radical response to Ryosuke’s exploitative practices – i.e. his continuous attempts to deceive the other subject and exploit his desire to consume for his own financial gain.   

By obliquely shifting the angle of the horrifying faceless desire for the spectator, Kurosawa elegantly transforms his narrative into a cat-and-mouse-like thriller. This narrative shift is effective not only because of the concatenation of twists and turns the spectator is subjected to but also due to the simple fact that Ryosuke fails to resolve the horrifying confrontation with an opaque desire. He cannot, in any way, acknowledge the imaginary injuries his transgressive thirst for profit has inflicted on the “failures in life” who have “nothing to do with” him.    

The fact that nearly every character in the narrative is marked by the capitalistic machinery – the command to enjoy through consumption, by profiting from others, or by sadistically-flavoured exploitative acts – renders the spectator unable to arouse any sympathy for Ryosuke or those who come to hunt him (Narra-note 1). While certain spectators might feel hindered by such inability, Kurosawa seeks to ‘frustrate’ the spectator to brutally confront him with the fact that, within a system determined by capitalism and consumerism, social bonds are frail and volatile and emotions are blunted. Social interactions follow a mere imaginary dynamic, playing out on a dualistic field where peace and war between egos are sides of the same coin, and seek to render the field of subjectivity void. The finale of Cloud powerfully emphasizes that interacting with the other in accordance to the capitalistic logic – addressing an alter-ego, misrecognizing the subjectivity of the Other, every act and signifier determined by the signifier profit/money and the production of pleasure – is identical to wandering on the royal road to one’s subjective hell.   

While the flow of the Kurosawa’s composition appears, at first glance, quite straightforward – merely framing the mundane with a balanced mix of static and dynamic shots, it does not take long for Kurosawa to disturb the evoked ‘mundane’ equilibrium by introducing foreshadowing visual elements (e.g. slow zoom-in movement, utilizing the frame to signal the presence of a threat outside the frame, sudden swift camera movements, … etc.) – stylistic elements straight out of the horror director’s toolbox – and subtle intrusive imagery (e.g. the dark shadow of a man passing by on the bus) into his composition (Sound-note 1, Cine-note 1).

The interweaving of such stylistic interventions and the thoughtful use muted, yet disconcerting musical pieces and threatening sounds allows the muted colours of the visual frame and the lingering presence of dark shadows within the shot-composition to become effective generators of mood. It is by rippling the mundane that the ‘mundane’ darkish spots within the frame become indicative of a yet unrealized threat.

With his thriller Cloud, Kurosawa delivers a biting critique of way capitalism and consumerism has transformed our subjectivity and the way we interact with others. Kurosawa forbids the spectator to feel any kind of sympathy for any of the characters – a necessary but divisive intervention, to confront him with the horrifying absurdity of relying solely on pleasure/ enjoyment to organize one’s place within the societal field. Highly recommended.  

Notes

General-note 1: The problem is not that the subject wants to make money, but that he installs money as an object that to define himself and mediates between himself and the other. Money rather than desire comes to define the way the subject realizes himself within the societal field. Or, to put it differently, the subject installs the object of money between him and the other to ward off the subjectivity of the Other and the Otherness of his lack and desire.

Narra-note 1: Spectators might feel puzzled by Sano as his logic does not seem to follow the capitalistic logic. However, the signifiers he enunciates in the finale reveals him to be representation of those institutions who profit from keeping subjects imprisoned within an imaginary interactional field poisoned by envy, pleasure, depression, and violence.   

Sano signals the presence of an external power that consolidates its power and safeguards the hierarchal structure by promoting capitalistic happiness and endless consumption, impoverishing social bonds, and sowing discord between the ego and its alter-egos.

Sound-note 1: In some cases, Kurosawa heightens the impact of intrusive visual moments by draining the narrative space of its ‘mundane’ sounds.  

Cine-note 1: Kurosawa, furthermore, utilizes the compositional power of the geometrical dimension thoughtfully to sprinkle the visual fabric with many subtle moments of visual pleasure.In one instance,Kurosawa’s utilizes the shot-reverse shot pattern to heighten the visual impact of Ryosuke staring at his computer screen.