Kiyoshi Kurosawa specializes in contaminating the familiar. His ordinary settings gradually unravel until society looks unstable. In Cure (1997), violence spreads through a rational society if it were a suggestion lodged inside the mind; in Pulse (2001), the Internet becomes an opening through which loneliness and death leak into everyday life; in Tokyo Sonata (2008), economic collapse corrodes the structures supposed to protect people from the outside.

When Kurosawa abandons supernatural horror, he rarely abandons its underlying logic. His real monsters are conditions of isolation, anxiety, repression, alienation, and the ease with which people can become frightening to one another.

Cloud (2024) appears to translate the worldview into an action thriller. Ryosuke Yoshii is an online reseller who buys goods cheaply and sells for considerably more, leaving his factory job to pursue the business full-time. His success funds a modest suburban life with his girlfriend and an employee.

Yet Yoshii’s prosperity also attracts resentment. Customers accuse him of selling counterfeit products; anonymous users discuss him online; threats accumulate; a dead rat appears at his doorstep. Eventually, the dispersed people he has offended resemble an army, hunting him physically and planning to kill him while recording the act for an audience.

Kurosawa views the Internet as a tool that turns private hatreds into collective violence. “This hate from one person is very small,” he explained, “but with the internet, it is multiplied.” This formulation pinpoints the film’s philosophical center: the Internet as an amplifier. Cloud is interested in the transformation of resentment into a crowd, and in the pleasure individuals discover when grievances part of a common cause.

Using Girard and Canetti, the film explores unity through mutual destruction.

Yoshii is thus less compelling as a villain. He is guilty, yet ordinary. His ambition is embarrassingly mundane. He seeks profit, escape from a disliked job, and a full-time livelihood from his side business. Though his dubious exploitation of the uninformed is unethical, he is no grand capitalist mastermind.

He is a small-time opportunist operating inside a much larger economic structure. His mistake is that he learns how efficiently exploitation works when relationships are reduced to transactions.

Mimetic desire begins from the premise that desire is not always autonomous. We desire things because others do, or because someone else has deemed them desirable. Desire is triangular; the object matters, but so does the relationship between the subject and the model through whom the object acquires significance. Yoshii’s business operates within such a triangular structure.

He enters a market where an object’s value depends on peer bidding, perceived rarity, and buyer demand. His livelihood depends on a network of desire that he tries to detach from.

Kurosawa repeatedly places Yoshii before glowing displays of information, prices, bids, listings, and messages, making his face another surface illuminated by the logic of exchange. The screen promises distance. Yoshii doesn’t need to know the people buying from him, and they don’t need to know him. The anonymity seems beneficial, but the separation is temporary. Every transaction produces a relationship, and every relationship produces the possibility of resentment. The people on the other side of Yoshii’s computer may be invisible, but desires are not; they return as bodies.

Kurosawa has said he was interested in making an action film about “ordinary people,” why the violence in Cloud feels so peculiar. Its perpetrators look like customers, acquaintances, disappointed buyers, anonymous users, and people who have accumulated grievances against Yoshii from different directions, negative before it is positive, united by a shared object of resentment.

When rivalries multiply, and distinctions become unbearable, collective violence can redirect antagonism toward a single person. Scapegoats need not be responsible; as containers for frustration, they transcend individual offenses. Yoshii’s actual crimes and selfishness therefore matter less; each accusation adds another layer to a comprehensive image of the man who deserves punishment. He personifies everything they resent about their world.

Though Yoshii’s victims have legitimate grievances, their retaliation remains unjustified. The film traces the escalation from complaint to revenge and collective murder. Once a grievance enters a mimetic network, it is difficult to distinguish the injury from the pleasure of participating in its punishment.

Violence is going to be watched. The act requires an audience because the audience confirms that the crowd’s violence matters. The murder becomes an event that requires spectators. Here, Cloud folds the viewer into its own structure. We are watching people watch violence; watching a film asks us what makes violence interesting, frightening, or pleasurable to look at. Kurosawa denies us the conventional satisfactions of the action movie. His violence is awkward, ugly, prolonged, and exhausting.

A conventional revenge thriller gives violence a narrative economy. Cloud destroys the economy, generates further killing, each act of violence creates another reason for violence, and the revenge narrative begins to resemble a machine, can continue operating after its original purpose has disappeared.

For Canetti, crowds alter interpersonal relationships. The isolated individual experiences distance, hierarchy, status, and difference, and the crowd abolishes the distinctions. As Canetti puts it, “The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge.” The discharge is the moment when individuals feel to be equal, when the burdens separating them seem to disappear.

Cloud presents a sinister version of such phenomenon. United by common hatred, Yoshii’s diverse enemies become equals.

Yoshii’s pursuers therefore require him to remain alive. As the condition of collective existence, he provides a lethal purpose that masks internal fractures. The crowd can be united because the person at its center has not yet been destroyed.

Kurosawa skips psychological backstories to focus on how collectivism erases individual identity. The crowd requires no uniformity of thought. It requires everyone to move in the same direction.

Yoshii’s new house, imagined as a sign of independence, becomes a warehouse. Boxes accumulate. Objects lose domestic context and become inventory. The house is technically a home, but it looks like a commercial facility. Kurosawa’s gray, metallic cinematography strips the environment of warmth without making it dystopian. It is clean, orderly, and functional. The danger emerges from ordinary modern spaces that have lost the capacity to provide security.

What began as his private domestic space becomes a place of confinement; what began as a site of accumulation becomes a site of vulnerability. The two spaces mirror one another because both are organized around objects, distance, and restricted movement. In one, Yoshii tries to control the circulation of commodities. In the other, his enemies control the circulation of bodies.

Kurosawa’s camera refuses to direct our gaze, leaving spaces open and threatening after the action ends. Violence strikes unguided by thriller conventions. In a Criterion Channel discussion of the film, Kurosawa describes his preference for long takes and sparse musical accompaniment as part of his approach to action. Spectators experience uncertainty before experiencing excitement. We wait. We scan the frame. We listen.

Because the crowd is offscreen, Yoshii knows people are angry with him before he understands what people are becoming. Threats arrive as messages. Objects appear out of place. Sounds suggest activity beyond the visible frame. Therefore, the spectator occupies Yoshii’s position. We know it is approaching, but we do not yet know its shape. The crowd exists first as an abstraction, then as a possibility, and finally as a physical mass.

Kurosawa has used the horror genre to make invisible social forces perceptible. In Pulse, loneliness architectural; empty rooms and dark computer screens seem to embody a social world in which people are physically near one another but existentially unreachable. Cloud reverses the problem. Here, the danger is that people can connect too easily around the wrong thing.

Kurosawa focuses on how the internet amplifies existing human insecurities. If technology were the villain, removing technology would theoretically solve the problem, but the film suggests the crowd is latent in the individual. The network provides the means through which isolated people discover one another.

Yoshii reduces others to anonymous units, only to be reduced himself by collective hatred. He wants to extract value from relationships without becoming involved in them, and wants to extract satisfaction from his destruction without confronting the humanity of the person he is killing.

Sano’s decision to help Yoshii complicates the film’s emerging logic of collective violence because it demonstrates that participation in the system does not determine behavior. Sano has every reason to become resentful, and yet he does not surrender his individuality to the crowd. His intervention rejects mimetic logic, refusing to let others’ emotions dictate his response.

Initially, he views objects as commodities. He evaluates people according to usefulness. His detachment is part of his professional efficiency. By the end, he is forced into a position in which he must recognize the physical reality of violence: bodies bleed, people scream, death is irreversible, and survival requires choices that cannot be undone through a refund or an online transaction.

Yet Yoshii does not become virtuous. Violence does not purify him. The film’s murders do not constitute karmic correction. If anything, Cloud is suspicious of the very idea suffering automatically produces moral knowledge. Yoshii survives, but survival carries its contamination. Entering violence forecloses any return to his prior state.

Traditionally, the action hero acquires agency through violence. Yoshii acquires survival through violence but loses else in the process. Every successful act of self-defense creates another psychological debt. The film inverts the fantasy of empowerment that structures action cinema. Violence can keep you alive without making you powerful.

Losing its target, the crowd faces a void. The collective energy has to discharge; similarly, it shows how the scapegoat can temporarily stabilize a community without resolving the underlying rivalries that produced the crisis. The victim is removed, but the conditions that produced the antagonism remain.

Its violence keeps multiplying because nobody has solved the original problem. There is no reconciliation, no redistribution, no restored community. The characters move through a chain of retaliation until the distinction between victim and aggressor becomes unstable. What begins as a dispute over commodities becomes a conflict over reputation, then dignity, then revenge, and finally survival. The original object has disappeared long before the violence ends.

Modern collective violence does not necessarily require a grand ideology. It starts trivially, builds through repetition, and later adopts a moral vocabulary. People tell themselves they are correcting an injustice, protecting, exposing a fraud, or punishing those who deserve it, but once the group has formed, its continued existence becomes its justification. The enemy must be evil because the crowd needs to remain righteous.

Canetti observes that crowd equality is an illusion. Entering it temporarily liberates people from differences that haven’t actually disappeared. Cloud turns it into a contemporary nightmare. Online anonymity creates an illusion of equal voices and pure collective justice, but this is merely equality in resentment.

The film wants us to feel the difference between understanding a crowd and belonging to it. We can recognize why Yoshii is hated without wanting him dead. We can recognize that he has exploited people without accepting transformation into executioners. We understand revenge’s satisfaction while recognizing its toll. The spectator occupies an unstable ethical position: invited to judge, yet forced to retract.

Gradually, Cloud removes the privilege. The camera denies us moral superiority, presenting violence as both absurd and comprehensible. Though terrifying, the emotions motivating Yoshii’s pursuers are entirely recognizable. Yoshii is selfish, but his desire for a better life is recognizable too. Sano is sympathetic, but he must participate in violence to survive. Nobody escapes the system cleanly.

Kurosawa once described the contemporary Japanese condition as one in which ordinary people carry significant anxiety about the future, with the Internet providing a form of relief. In Cloud, collective identification can transform anxiety into certainty. Faced with uncertainty, people assign blame. Instead of enduring the ambiguity of individual life, entering a crowd supplies a direction. Instead of asking what has gone wrong, ask who should pay.

As a spiritual successor to Pulse even though its premise is different, Pulse imagined technology as a medium through which loneliness became contagious; Cloud imagines technology as a medium through which resentment becomes collective. The first film is haunted by people who cannot connect. The latter film is haunted by people who connect too effectively. In both cases, the terror comes from a social failure.

Diffuse and shifting, a cloud appears innocuous while concealing much darker forces. The collective hatred in Cloud begins in nebulous form. No single person seems capable of producing the catastrophe. No mastermind commands the group; no singular ideology organizes its members. Accumulation occurs: resentments stack, messages multiply, and kindred spirits find each other. Eventually, the cloud acquires density.

Kurosawa’s achievement is making us experience it. Through pauses, silence, and anti-spectacular action, the film trains us to distrust standard thriller mechanics. We wait for catharsis and receive exhaustion. We expect justice and encounter retaliation. We expect individual villains and discover a social organism.

“Profiteering and revenge overlap and amplify,” Kurosawa wrote in his director’s statement, “eventually setting violent acts into motion.” The sentence could serve as Cloud‘s entire architecture. Profit generates rivalry; rivalry produces resentment; resentment seeks a target; the target generates collective identification; collective identification produces violence; violence creates new grievances that require new targets. The system feeds itself.

What matters, then, is the frightening ease with which a society of isolated individuals can manufacture a temporary sense of community through hatred. Girard explains why the enemy becomes necessary; Canetti explains why the crowd becomes intoxicating. Kurosawa supplies the images of what happens when the theories acquire bodies, weapons, screens, warehouses, and blood.

The result is a film about the moment when private desire stops belonging to the individual who experiences it. Cloud understands the most dangerous crowd is the crowd composed of ordinary people who have discovered else can carry the weight of everything they fear, resent, and cannot explain.

Kurosawa’s world has always been full of ghosts, but in Cloud the ghost has changed. It is the crowd itself.

References

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