Overlook Film Festival 2025 – Writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has a long and robust filmography. Horror fans know him best for the J-horror classics Pulse and Cure. His latest, Cloud, is a twisty psychological thriller with some truly unnerving sequences. The genre-bender is also a commentary on class through the world of online reselling.

The film stars Masaki Suda as a laundry factory worker named Ryosuke. Fed up with his ho-hum job, he turns to online reselling to obtain more and more money. In the opening, viewers witness Ryosuke essentially commit a heist. He convinces an older couple that their product is worthless. They beg him to meet them halfway on the cost, but he refuses. Minutes later, he sells the product online for well beyond the little money he paid for it. When Ryosuke swindles the couple, Kurosawa mixes wide angle shots with close-ups to create a creeping and unsettling feeling that permeates the film. Though Cloud isn’t a straight-up horror film in the traditional sense, it’s still downright chilling at times.

This uneasy feeling grows as Ryosuke’s addiction worsens. There are sequences where he stays up all night, staring at his computer, watching consumers purchase his products that flash on the screen. These moments reminded me of the director’s deeply eerie early internet horror film Pulse for the way they depict addiction and loneliness. There’s simply something haunting about the computer screen’s glow and Ryosuke’s constant gaze upon it.

Yet even though Ryosuke isn’t exactly a good dude and swindles people to make a quick buck, he’s still a relatable character. He’s eager to climb the social ladder and no longer work in a factory, even after he’s offered a managerial position. He promises his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), they can have a bigger and better apartment. The place he lives in feels cramped and suffocating, especially when the boxes of junk he plans to resell pile up. It’s a prison of his own making, a growing addiction he can’t escape. His online business becomes so big so fast that he hires an assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), who stands with him when things turn really bad.

The film drips with a sense of paranoia and dread. This is fostered both by Ryosuke’s addiction and his feeling that the sellers will eventually turn on him and resort to violence because he sells them knock-off products. He fears that an unhappy, potentially violent costumer lurks around every shadowy corner. This paranoia worsens. The second half of the film leans into the action as Ryosuke indeed pays for what he’s done. The film’s last 30 minutes or so morph into a long shoot-out that could have been trimmed and drag down an otherwise strong film. Yet, they do highlight how much Ryosuke has changed. There’s a powerful moment where he shoots one of his assailants and realizes the full extent of his actions. In what otherwise could have been a mind-numbing, overly long action sequence, Kurosawa underscores the morality tale.

Cloud is an unnerving, genre-bending statement on class. There are sequences in here as hair-raising as anything Kurosawa crafted in Pulse or Cure, just without the ghosts or serial killers. Though the film struggles with pacing in its second half, it’s still a timely and psychological morality tale.