This movie might just be 2024’s most unnerving action thriller

In a perfect world, the success of Longlegs this summer would draw fresh eyes to one of its plainest influences. No, not Thomas Harris, though you didn’t need to be clairvoyant to see a little Manhunter in that manhunt thriller. Let’s talk instead about Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the prolific Japanese director of expertly made, uncanny fright fests like Cure and Pulse. The creepiest moments in Longlegs all come from his playbook: pockets of foreboding dead air, wide shots held just a hair too long for comfort, the way he slowly draws our attention to ominous expanses of empty or offscreen space, using what we’re not seeing to get under our skin. Call it the Kiyoshi touch.

Kurosawa himself loses that touch sometimes. Since riding the J-horror wave to international recognition at the start of the 21st century, his track record has been spotty; for every superb exercise in unease, there’s been an awkward genre experiment that glitches into outright silliness. Cloud, the new Kurosawa movie playing this week in Toronto (and his third film this year!), is a little of both. As a cautionary tale about the dangers of web grifting, it’s difficult to take very seriously. But the director’s tight grip on his craft hasn’t slackened, and he applies it here to what becomes — through his usual close attention to blocking and framing — an unusually unnerving action thriller.

In terms of style and subject matter, you could call Cloud a companion piece to Kurosawa’s most famous film: the terrifying and quintessential ghost-in-the-machine thriller Pulse, which presciently imagined the web as a dark force swallowing alienated youth whole. (This was, mind you, years before impressionable kids had started plummeting down YouTube rabbit holes to radicalization and despair.) While that movie presented the web as a kind of passive threat to the fabric of society, luring teenagers into a trance state of doom, this new one takes aim at a slick new generation of internet hucksterism, and the part it plays in exacerbating currents of free-floating rage. The title refers to both the nebulous digital ether where so much of our data lives and a mob forming like an ominous cumulonimbus.

Kurosawa sets his cursor on an emblematically empty character: Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a twentysomething resale hustler who gouges and cheats strangers on the internet. Cloud opens with him lowballing a medical supply company for an unsold shipment of so-called “therapy machines” they’re desperate to unload. A few minutes later, Ryosuke — who goes by the username alias Ratel — plops down in front of his computer monitor and blankly waits for the items to sell. Which they do, slowly at first and then steadily, disappearing from his online store one by one as if he were willing the online shopping spree with the same hypnotic powers the villain of Cure used to provoke murder. 

For a while, Cloud operates like little more than a character study of a web-age slacker entrepreneur with few ambitions and fewer scruples. So averse to responsibility that he quits his factory day job the minute his boss starts pushing him to take a promotion, Ryosuke ends up leaving Tokyo with his girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa) and moving into a lodge in a small town where he can run his resale swindle full time. Is all of this simply Kurosawa’s generational critique, a portrait of budding young sociopath-capitalists seeking passive income?

Though it takes its time, Cloud does eventually reach a turning point — the moment when Ryosuke’s casual chicanery catches up to him. Much more about that pivot probably shouldn’t be disclosed, except to say that the movie resists any explicitly supernatural explanation even as it reaches a fever pitch of heightened absurdity that borders on dream logic. At the film’s Toronto press screening, the mounting violence was met with explosions of laughter — an overreaction, perhaps, to the movie’s genre shift, but one that speaks to the low stakes Kurosawa sets. When your protagonist is a coolly immoral eBay scoundrel, there’s only so much you can invest (one way or the other) in his bizarre crucible of comeuppance, when the havoc wreaked from a keyboard finally results in some irl consequences.

Cloud is a little too goofy to work as any kind of chilling statement about the internet as a cesspool of greed and wrath. Still, you don’t have to buy into its whole nightmare doxxing scenario to appreciate how it’s staged. Kurosawa has caught flattering comparisons to John Carpenter, a kindred spirit in the lost art of building suspense through composition. To that end, Cloud ends up playing like an outrageous riff on Assault on Precinct 13, blurring the line between action spectacle and home-invasion horror. It’s all in how the director orchestrates the mayhem — using the foreground and background, emphasizing shadows and shapes.

There is, for example, a heart-stopping moment when Ryosuke catches someone in the window, and as he backs into the kitchen, the figure lumbers into frame, suddenly inside, closing the gap between potential and immediate danger. In that moment, Kurosawa gets the Kiyoshi touch back. Even a “minor” thriller like Cloud can remind you what his clammy hand on the back of the neck feels like.

Cloud recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is still awaiting U.S. distribution.