In a double-dyed man , the success ofLonglegsthis summer would draw sweet eye to one of its plainest influence . No , not Thomas Harris , though you did n’t need to be clairvoyant to see a littleManhunterin that manhunt thriller . Let ’s talk instead about Kiyoshi Kurosawa , the fertile Nipponese director of like an expert made , unearthly fright fests likeCureandPulse . The creepiest moments inLonglegsall amount from his playbook : pockets of foreboding dead aura , wide blastoff held just a haircloth too long for consolation , the way of life he slowly delineate our attention to forbidding expanses of empty or offscreen blank , using what we’renotseeing to get under our skin . Call it the Kiyoshi cutaneous senses .

Kurosawa himself loses that feeling sometimes . Since riding the J - horror undulation to international recognition at the startle of the 21st 100 , his track criminal record has been spotty ; for every superb exercise in unease , there ’s been an cumbersome genre experiment that glitches into unlimited silliness . Cloud , the new Kurosawa movie trifle this week in Toronto ( and his third moving-picture show this year ! ) , is a little of both . As a warning tale about the dangers of vane grifting , it ’s hard to take very in earnest . But the director ’s squiffy grip on his craft has n’t slow up , and he applies it here to what becomes — through his usual close attention to blocking and framing — an unusually unnerving action thriller .

In price of style and subject matter , you could callClouda companion piece to Kurosawa ’s most far-famed film : the terrific and quintessential ghost - in - the - machine thrillerPulse , which presciently imagined the web as a dark personnel immerse anomic youth whole . ( This was , mind you , years before impressionable kids had started plummeting downYouTuberabbit holes to radicalization and despair . ) While that movie presented the vane as a sort of passive threat to the framework of society , luring teen into a spell state of end of the world , this new one takes object at a slick new generation of cyberspace hucksterism , and the part it flirt in aggravate currents of free - floating furor . The claim look up to both the nebulose digital ether where so much of our datum living and a mob spring like an ill cumulonimbus cloud .

Kurosawa define his pointer on an emblematically empty character : Ryosuke Yoshii ( Masaki Suda ) , a twentysomething resale floozy who gouges and cheats strangers on the cyberspace . Cloudopens with him lowball a medical provision company for an unsold shipment of so - called “ therapy machines ” they ’re desperate to unload . A few bit after , Ryosuke — who goes by the username false name Ratel — plump down in front of his information processing system monitor and blankly waits for the items to betray . Which they do , slowly at first and then steady , disappearing from his online store one by one as if he were willing the online shopping spree with the same mesmeric powers the villain ofCureused to provoke slaying .

For a while , Cloudoperates like piffling more than a character study of a web - age slacker entrepreneur with few ambitions and fewer scruple . So averse to responsibility that he quits his factory solar day job the minute his Bos originate pushing him to take a promotion , Ryosuke ends up leaving Tokyo with his girlfriend ( Kotone Furukawa ) and moving into a lodge in a low town where he can guide his resale rig full time . Is all of this simply Kurosawa ’s generational review article , a portrayal of budding young psychopath - capitalists essay peaceful income ?

Though it takes its clock time , Clouddoes finally reach a turning point in time — the moment when Ryosuke ’s effortless chicanery catches up to him . Much more about that pivot probably should n’t be disclosed , except to say that the movie resist any explicitly supernatural account even as it reach a fever pitch of heightened absurdity that borders on dream logic . At the film ’s Toronto press covering , the climb up fierceness was met with explosion of laughter — an overreaction , perhaps , to the moving-picture show ’s genre slip , but one that speaks to the low stakes Kurosawa sets . When your protagonist is a nonchalantly immoral eBay villain , there ’s only so much you could invest ( one room or the other ) in his bizarre melting pot of comeuppance , when the havoc wreaked from a keyboard at long last results in some irl consequences .

Cloudis a trivial too goofy to work as any sort of chilling financial statement about the internet as a sink of greed and anger . Still , you do n’t have to buy into itswhole nightmare doxxing scenario to prize how it ’s staged . Kurosawa has caught flattering compare to John Carpenter , a kindred spirit in the bemused prowess of build suspense through composition . To that end , Cloudends up playing like an outrageous Riffian onAssault on Precinct 13 , blurring the stock between action at law spectacle and menage - invasion revulsion . It ’s all in how the director orchestrates the mayhem — using the foreground and screen background , stress shadows and shapes .

There is , for example , a center - stopping moment when Ryosuke catches someone in the window , and as he backs into the kitchen , the soma lumbers into frame , suddenlyinside , exit the opening between potential and straightaway peril . In that mo , Kurosawa stick the Kiyoshi tinge back . Even a “ minor ” thriller likeCloudcan remind you what his dank paw on the back of the cervix feel like .

Cloudrecently screen at the Toronto International Film Festival . It is still awaiting U.S. distribution .