In his 2001 horror classic Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa portrays the internet as a space of dark enchantment, a portal for evil spirits to invade the world of the living. Cloud, a new thriller which sees Kurosawa return to the subject twenty-four years later, contends with a vastly different online environment: whatever enchantment existed on the internet of 2001 has been replaced by the commercialized blandness of sigma grindset sermons and AI slop. Black Mirror, now in its seventh season, has become tired and repetitive, unable to compete with a world that continues to surpass its bleak depictions of the spiritual darkness of cyberspace. In this jaded landscape, Cloud faces a unique challenge: how does one make a thriller about the internet when the web has become so boring?

The modern web is, first and foremost, a place to sell things. Fittingly, Cloud follows Ryosuke Yoshii, a blank-faced Tokyo factory worker with a side gig as an online reseller. Yoshii is surreally dull, speaking in a terse monotone and habitually wearing clothes that blend into the wallpaper behind him. His life is a mechanical series of wholesaler negotiations, online sales postings, and product drop-offs.

Yoshii appears to deal mostly in meaningless goods, such as quack medical devices and fake designer handbags, which he offloads onto other unsuspecting resellers through a video game–like e-commerce platform. He isn’t selling products as much as he is participating in a never-ending chain of speculation and misery, one that brings to mind the hype-based frauds and pyramid schemes that are a fixture of the modern web economy.

The film’s first act wonderfully captures the claustrophobic circularity of Yoshii’s life through its repetitive editing and the disquieting aloofness of Masaki Suda’s central performance. The claustrophobia is made worse by the fact that he seems to have no true exit strategy: it’s unclear what Yoshii wants from his resale profits because it’s unclear whether he is capable of wanting anything at all. While he makes half-hearted promises to his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) about getting married and starting a new life, the only thing that seems to give Yoshii any semblance of pleasure is watching the flashing lights that accompany successful sales on his seller page. Suda imbues Yoshii with the hollowed-out look of a hypnosis victim resigned to chasing the interminable cycles of the online economy. In one memorable shot, Yoshii watches a coffee grinder spinning endlessly in place as if observing a kindred spirit.

The monotone rhythms of Yoshii’s life are occasionally invaded by Antonioni-esque non sequiturs: we see him discovering a dead rat on his doorstep or recoiling from a faceless figure on a bus. Although these detours point to a simmering paranoia underneath Yoshii’s lifestyle, they are too brief and uninspired to generate much tension. What does shine through is the film’s bizarre sense of humor. The entire social fabric of Yoshii’s world operates on the logic of the terminally online, and the film delights in presenting absurd, alien renditions of everyday interactions. In one cringe-inducing scene, Yoshii introduces Akiko to a business associate who behaves as if he is on a red pill forum (“I didn’t you know you’d found conventional happiness,” he tells Yoshii). In another, Yoshii is stalked by a former boss who is obsessed with delivering generic pep talks that seem lifted from YouTube self-help videos.

As his business begins to take off, Yoshii quits his job and moves out of Tokyo to an isolated suburb. There, in a sterile lakeside cabin that resembles a WeWork, he dedicates himself fully to his reselling obsession, gradually disentangling himself from the last of his humanity in the process. He barely bats an eye when Akiko, fed up with the crippling boredom of her new life, abandons him.

The film takes a jarring turn in its second half, when we abruptly shift perspectives to a debt-ridden reseller who has recently been scammed by Yoshii. We soon learn that an assorted group of Yoshii’s enemies and victims have been conspiring online to murder him via livestream. They have no real desire to recover lost funds or enact vigilante justice — they don’t even seem particularly angry at Yoshii. The point, if there is one, is simply online attention and “a bit of stress relief.” Like Yoshii, the mob seems zombified, as if their violence is simply an inevitable outgrowth of the same cycles of transaction that fuel Yoshii’s resale addiction.

Cloud’s depiction of the mob harkens back to previous Kurosawa films such as Cure, which centered on violence committed by ordinary people under the influence of hypnosis. Whereas Cure derived potent horror from the dead-eyed, puppet-like movements of its slashers, Cloud repurposes the same devices for bleak comedy. There is something undeniably hilarious about a group of murderers who handle shotguns like gardening tools and affect the bored, attention-seeking nihilism of a 4chan board. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, the mob bickers over whether one of its members should be allowed to keep a mask on to preserve his anonymity as Yoshii sits bound and gagged in a nearby chair.

Yoshii is eventually rescued by his loyal assistant Sano, kicking off an extended gunfight between the duo and their captors. Curiously, Cloud makes the decision to deliberately remove every last bit of suspense from its climax. The set is barren and brightly lit; the camera work is flat and utilitarian, often resembling a Call of Duty game. The pacing of the violence has the same repetitive matter-of-factness as the sequences where Yoshii is shipping handbags. Most importantly, nobody seems particularly worried about dying — after all, what do these guys have to look forward to if they make it out alive? What should be a cathartic bloodbath ends up feeling like doomscrolling.

Kurosawa’s uncanny approach to his final set piece will no doubt alienate many viewers. It is, however, a perfect conclusion to the world he has crafted, one in which everything — even violence — is flattened by the spiritual vacuum of the modern internet.

Pulse worked as a conventional horror film because it was set in a world in which the isolating, depersonalizing potential of the internet was a new force, something that could possibly come for our souls. Cloud is perhaps best categorized as an anti-horror, one that captures the disquieting — and at times bleakly funny — emptiness of navigating a world where there is no fear because there are no souls left to be lost.

Near the end of the film, Yoshii confronts his fiercest rival, who declares they are both headed to hell when they die. Yoshii emerges from that duel victorious and spends the final scene contemplating his next business move. He looks like he’d rather be in hell.