Cloud review – all-time bleakest episode of Only Fools and Horses

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film Pulse portrayed the still young internet as a means through which spirits of the dead could transmute themselves from the finite limits of limbo: breaking into the land of the living like static interference to exacerbate already widespread alienation and sow seeds of destruction. Nearly 25 years later, in the doomscrolling and enshittification era, the internet has since been confirmed as a portal to hell.

Cloud is the Japanese master of dread’s latest rumination on this idea, and is less concerned with supernaturally-assisted depression and more with how online identities and the capitalist grindset have drained people of their humanity. If you’ve ever wished ill towards a scalper, Kurosawa has the film for you. But this darkly comic thriller also skewers those who flirt with fantasies of vengeance from behind supposed anonymity. Doxing can be both legitimately deadly and blatantly incompetent at the same time.

The first of Cloud’s riveting two hours is spent compiling grievances and sins for the case against Yoshii (Masaki Suda), the film’s protagonist (certainly not its hero). A young man who resells goods online under the username ‘Ratel’, Yoshii purchases and hoards all manner of products in bulk so that he can artificially inflate the prices to pass them on for profit, with little concern for whether certain designer items are actually the real thing. In Cloud’s opening, we see him purchase medical devices he doesn’t even understand from a confounded couple, bringing them to his cramped apartment where stacks of boxes almost fully conceal the walls and furniture. Say what you will about Del Boy’s business practices in Only Fools and Horses, but at least his home maintained a bit of cosiness.

You’d think there’d be warmth in Yoshii’s bond with girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), but her curious existence in this film, even when living in the same place as her lover, mostly consists of ogling the more lavish material rewards that Yoshii’s shady dealings bring into her orbit. Theirs is a relationship where affection is expressed solely through the promise of accumulating more money to spend; where the prospect of marriage is discussed as another commodity, rather than any reflection of devotion through thick and thin. Even their moving in together at a spacious lake house rental is not born of true romance, but of Yoshii attempting to hide his tracks from disgruntled buyers.

Unfortunately, various demons come knocking as Cloud deftly shifts into both home-invasion horror and bleakly funny action movie. Among the ragtag assailants seeking violent retribution — all losers who met online — are an experienced doxer who’s there just for the fun of trolling and Yoshii’s former boss, who’s presented as analogous to an overly-invested reply guy on social media. Playing like a slicker, more vicious riff on Ben Wheatley’s Mexican stand-off film, Free Fire, the climactic gunplay chaos is all the more chilling for the impotence ultimately behind so much of the rage being vented.

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