On demand: "Cloud"

The latest ambient thriller from Japanese genre ace Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cloud, hones in on the ways we now work. Protagonist Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is a faintly passive, vaguely uptight young man whose nine-to-five gig in some sort of printshop has become secondary to a lucrative sidehustle: buying up and then reselling sought-after consumer goods online, much as you and I might from time to time on eBay or Vinted. This entrepreneurial savoir-faire, a characteristic we're told employers in our free-market economy find most attractive, has turned his poky flat into a branch of Argos, because he's obliged to buy in bulk to turn even a marginal profit; it also empowers him to shrug off the obstacles Kurosawa begins to sling in his path, which range from the dead rat one aggrieved customer leaves on his doorstep to the razorwire that trips him off his motorbike. Matters get unignorably tricky, however, once an old schoolfriend - the model of the movie tech bro folks probably shouldn't be getting involved with - invites Yoshii to double his money by overseeing an auction website that presents as a sleek new incarnation of the old black market. As if this weren't ominous enough, the position requires relocation to a modernist house on the banks of a vast lake, the kind of liminal space in which nothing good can ever happen.

These last developments are a little conventional for a Kurosawa film, but Cloud is another of this director's thrillers to be driven by a recognisably human urge - in this instance, the desire to shut oneself away behind screens so as to make one's fortune, to plug in, switch on and cash out. Yoshii can't, however - or at least he can't without serious consequences: his paranoia ramps up as this bucolic Fort Knox proves vulnerable to attack, and a narrative rupture around the halfway mark proves him right to be on edge, by introducing an angry mob of consumers weaponising the Internet to put a price on Yoshii's head in turn. (This is a nice, pulpy reversal: a man who trades in collectibles and designer clutchbags suddenly finds he's become a prized item.) Yet if the scenario invites the manic accelerationism one encounters online, Kurosawa remains glacial in his pacing; he's one of the few contemporary thriller directors to grasp how unsettling sustained silence can be (doubly so in an ever-noisier world that demands we serve as our own carnival barkers), and he alights upon one naggingly creepy effect in having the sun set suddenly on any given scene, as if we were witnessing not just the end of trading but the end of the very world. (Here, perhaps, is that apocalyptic capitalism Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor were writing about, willing to trade the climate and planet for a few more coins in the bank.)

Cloud presents as one for the connoisseurs rather than the casual thrillseekers among us: for at least an hour, it's more elegant than particularly exciting. Though those sudden, jolting lurches around the midpoint demonstrate a keen understanding of just how rapidly things can turn ugly within a life lived primarily online, Kurosawa remains temperamentally closer to Michael Haneke than Michael Bay, forever predisposed to apply the cold compress of rigorous critical thought to material that might, in other hands, be encouraged to heat up. Still, it does seem logical that a thriller so vehemently opposed to shameless commerce should come over as anti-commercial in its methods. The movie's grim endgame unfolds around an abandoned factory, that stock thriller location here afforded an entirely new context (presumably any manufacturing there has been hollowed out by the pivot to digital), and comprises sequence after sequence of desperate begging and petty throatcutting, undertaken by ordinary citizens driven to protect their interests and/or make a killing of one kind or another. "Surprisingly easy," a minor character notes after Yoshii has gunned down one of his pursuers in cold blood. Rather than any slambang conclusion, this is what unchecked capitalism reduces us all to, Kurosawa ventures, and it sure ain't pretty or stirring.

Cloud is now available to rent via Prime Video, YouTube and the BFI Player.