In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ‘Cloud,’ an online hustler gets his merciless, real-world comeuppance

As with the proverbial frog in that pot of water, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s chilling action-thriller “Cloud,” about a callow internet hustler’s reckoning, has nothing good to offer about where online anonymity and e-capitalism have gotten us. But the journey to that lethal, rolling boil is, in the hands of Japan’s premier suspense director, certainly a nail-biting one, a tale of carefully weighed clicks that lead to a lot of rashly pulled triggers.

What loneliness plus technology hath wrought is a central theme of Kurosawa’s, and he’s tried to warn us. In his seminal, turn-of-the-millennium freakouts “Cure” and “Pulse” — movies that spurred the J-horror phenomenon — paranoid dread was palpable, an ongoing worry as ordinary people became victims of a violent senselessness. You could watch these occult-tinged scenarios and think, “That future looks scary.” Speculative technophobic horror has been replaced by a disturbance more bleakly resonant: how things are now. Kurosawa’s title isn’t referencing our cyber era’s wispy metaphor for data security; he’s talking bad weather, the kind that’s here to stay.

As ever, it starts with the allure of opportunity. If you’re wondering what kind of person scoops up tickets for Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” a year in advance just to scalp at a 400% hike, meet Kurosawa’s blank-faced protagonist Yoshii (Masaki Suda). He’s a young Tokyo laundry plant worker who in his downtime traffics in resold goods at exorbitant markups, with little care for their authenticity. Though his factory boss (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) sees enough potential in him to offer a path to advancement, the direction-less, contempt-filled Yoshii would rather hole up in his apartment under a fake name and mercilessly lowball sellers and gouge buyers on the black market, each new sale on his computer screen like a dopamine hit.

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After an especially large windfall, which allows him to high-hat a onetime school colleague (Masataka Kubota), Yoshii quits the laundry. With his materialistic girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) in tow, he moves to a secluded house in the country to essentially decamp from civilization and maximize his operation — even hiring a fresh-faced assistant named Sano (Daiken Okudaira, sneakily perfect), who shows a keen interest in the business. But a series of bizarre, vaguely threatening incidents seems to follow Yoshii, a patten that eventually reveals itself in the film’s second hour as a coordinated campaign to exact righteous vengeance on an online scammer.

Kurosawa films the descent into kill-or-be-killed mayhem with his typically masterful visual proficiency — any given frame of Yasuyuki Sasaki’s no-nonsense cinematography can quickly go from bland to ominous. But none of it is cathartic, nor intended to be. It’s a showdown on the edge of an abyss or, from a blackly comic point of view, the grimmest edition ever of that old surprise-reunion show “This Is Your Life.” To view “Cloud” as mere commentary on 21st-century greed is to miss the existential nightmare that Yoshii’s armed, bloodthirsty and mostly hapless pursuers represent: regular folk driven to kill after a humiliating experience. And who are they gunning for? Someone just as pathetic. Game on.

Again, if you keep up with the news, this brutal collapse is more revealing than prophetic. The gathering dismay that was presented as a ghost in the machine when Kurosawa imagined “Pulse” in 2001 can now be depicted in “Cloud” with pitiless precision as a discernible reality, ready to be manifest whenever, wherever. “Let’s enjoy ourselves,” one of the older members of the mob implores to a fellow vigilante, and somehow that observation is scariest of all.

Yoshii does acquire some help, however, in trying to survive his ordeal, and it’s the kind of thematic touch that further deepens an eerie truth behind his seemingly over-the-top scenario: Somebody is always there to keep the chaos thriving. At one point, Yoshii mutters, “So this is how you get into hell.” He doesn’t exactly sound disturbed by the prospect.