The chilling extracted from the banal

Over the past three decades, Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has established himself as one of the most important directors in contemporary cinema. Although he's been working since the late 1980s, he gained worldwide recognition in 1997 with the critically acclaimed crime thriller "A Cure." In this film, Kurosawa already demonstrated his simultaneously intense and minimalist style, which blends the everyday lives of ordinary urban characters with unusual and often chilling situations.

Since then, the dense atmosphere—in which the dramatic construction is structured by time, silence, and the restraint of gestures—has permeated each of the nearly 30 films in his remarkable cinematography. Titles like Pulse (2001), Tokyo Sonata (2008), Creepy (2016), and Before Everything Disappears (2017) established an authorial signature marked by well-established and unconventional language codes.

Kurosawa comes from a generation of Japanese filmmakers who, in the 1990s and early 2000s, redefined genre cinema in the country. Directors like Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo, the Iron Man, 1989), Hideo Nakata (The Ring, 1998), and Takashi Miike (Audition, 1999) incorporated horror, suspense, and social drama into authorial projects, in which atmosphere matters as much as plot.

Urban loneliness, the collapse of communication between people, the crisis of identities and the discomfort in the face of the uncertainties of the turn of the century were, at that moment, captured in an original way by this group of filmmakers of which Kurosawa is a part – and, over the years, have stood out more and more.

His new work, Cloud – Nuvem de Vingança, showing in Brazilian theaters since Thursday the 17th, is quite representative of his style. A realistic drama, the feature film follows the story of Yoshii (Masaki Suda), a factory worker who also sells illegal goods online.

After making enough money to quit his job, the protagonist moves to a bigger house, expands his business, invites his girlfriend to live with him, and hires an assistant. However, the deeper he delves into shady dealings, the colder and more calculating the young man becomes. And the situation begins to spiral out of control when clients dissatisfied with his shenanigans come after him to demand satisfaction.

In an interview with Carta Capital conducted via video call, as part of the film's promotional efforts in Brazil, Kiyoshi Kurosawa says that, in fact, he is always searching for the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary within recognizable everyday scenarios.

"I want to bring what's real to the scene. Although I understand that the unreal and fantasy are inherent to cinema, I can't, from the very first step of the film, start thinking about cinema," he says. "My job, then, is this: I need to start thinking about reality."

That's why his films so naturally move toward the unusual—sometimes toward the bizarre, always toward the unexpected. The tension Cloud's audience experiences until midway through the film will eventually explode into violence. But the intensity of the action also extends beyond the comical and caricatured.

Kurosawa is aware of this: "The moment certain characters start to appear, the viewer will think, 'Man, these people exist, this is real, this could happen,'" he describes. "But I'm stepping outside of reality to get to the essence of the film, adding a degree of comedy to it."

Another strong element in Cloud is a certain air of melancholy, which reflects a feeling of the characters and which can be understood as a commentary by the filmmaker on the broader meaning of capitalist relations in an increasingly globalized world.

“You’re there, with several people around you, you have some kind of relationship, but in the end, you’re always alone,” says the filmmaker.

The consequence of this state of affairs can be, as Kurosawa says, emotional and individual isolation. "You're there, with several people around you, you have some kind of relationship, but in the end, you're always alone," he reflects. "I think that's what I capture and recognize in my films, because it's something we experience today. However, I don't connect loneliness with sadness."

The film can also be understood as a modern chronicle, since the anti-naturalism disguised as realism gradually gives way to the absurdity of the situations.

His narrative maturity means the director, who turns 70 on the 19th, doesn't react directly to contemporary ills. His perception is almost always witty and subtle; politics emerges in the way he films his characters and places them in conflict.

The assistant's extreme loyalty, the shift in gender roles, represented by his girlfriend, and the recklessness of both the protagonist and his pursuers say a lot about the desire for money, anger, and the automatism of survival.

Cloud – Cloud of Vengeance was released in Japan and several other countries in 2024. Although it's only just arriving in Brazil, it's part of a particularly productive crop of films from the director. He released three films last year alone: before Cloud came the previously unreleased Chime and The Serpent's Path.

Kurosawa, who received the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival for A Spy's Wife (2020), was also a professor of cinema at the University of Tokyo between 2005 and 2023. •

Published in issue no. 1371 of CartaCapital , on July 23, 2025.

This text appears in the print edition of CartaCapital under the title 'The chilling extracted from the banal'