Cloud

CLOUD ☁️ クラウド 

Have you ever tried buying tickets online to find it sold out within seconds, and then minutes later find it being resold for twice as much as the initial price? Yeah, me too.

CLOUD acts as a viciously targeted, serves-them-right type of public service announcement that strikes fear into the heart of a reseller who has his real life infiltrated by the online world he took advantage of. The reseller in this case is Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda).

By day he’s an unassuming factory worker; by night he’s scouring the web under the name ‘Ratel’ for products that are being sold for less than their cost price so that he can sell them for a profit. It seems simple enough, but once his buyers catch wind of his unethical profiteering tactics, they band together to seek out his true identity. From there we become entrenched in a long, drawn-out game of cat and mouse that rips apart the invisible walls of the Internet and makes a man face the reality of his dishonest ways.

There are some plot twists in CLOUD that feel unearned, and the pacing is definitely sluggish, but somehow it finds a way to circumvent those two negatives by creating a positively epic conclusion that levels up the intensity and ratchets up the absurdity, leaning into an end you will never see coming.

That is in most part due to Sano (Daiken Okudaira). Sano is the pinnacle of a man’s best friend. His whole story arc feels like it’s in an entirely different movie, but the impact and value he provides to the overarching story and especially the ending is all kinds of awesome.

By the end, Ryôsuke Yoshii’s (Masaki Suda) story becomes forgettable, which is surprising after everything he goes through, because of how fleeting it is in comparison to Sano’s shadowed character arc.

I keep repeating it, and I’ll double down again: the ending to this movie is my favourite conclusion to a film this year. It makes the slow burn of this psychological thriller worth the wait and crafts a wild reversal of hunters becoming the hunted that much more compelling.

This story also probably worked for me because I’m currently planning a trip to Japan, and the difficulty in grabbing tickets for events has been excruciating because of how many barriers are in place to deter resellers. I commend it because Canada needs a system like this in place but will continue to complain regardless, lol.

CLOUD takes the anonymity in that world of reselling to a nail-biting extreme as one man’s online hustle spirals into a paranoia-fueled game of cat and mouse. 

7.9/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 2hr04mins

Where:  In Theatres July 18th

Cloud Review (2025) The Richmond Reviewer - July 17th, 2025.

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