Tags: blog, film, thriller, 2026
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday February 12th, 2026
The Banality of Banality
The soundtrack to Cloud is the soundtrack to capitalism. The hum of a computer monitor, the drone of a motorway, the background growl of machines. It's constant and grinding and once you notice it, it becomes unsettling. Even scenes that take place in the woods have the endless swoosh of leafless trees as the wind slips off the lake onto shore.
That lifeless, listless, white noise perfectly encapsulates the emotional lives of both the main character, Ryosuke, an online reseller who buys from desperate sellers and sells at incredible mark-ups with incredulous descriptions, and the cast of characters around him. None of them have any real aspirations. Sure, they mostly want to make money, but for what purpose? None of them seem particularly clear on the matter.
At one point, Ryosuke and his girlfriend move into a large, lakeside house. He promptly moves his business in and turns the place into a warehouse. She spends her whole time wrestling with kitchen appliances. Neither talks about anything outside of making or spending money.
Eventually, Ryosuke's disinterest in ethics catches up with him as a loose cabal of former mentors, rivals and disgruntled customers attempt to settle their grudges with him. None of them seem to question the broken society that they're scrabbling around in. None of them think to take their anger out at the online platform owners who enable and richly profit from the misery they enable. Everyone's too busy fighting each other like rats in a sack to have anything approaching dreams or ambition.
For the most part, there's a grim fascination to be had from watching these dead eyed characters navigate their dead lives. The film has little sympathy for them and leaves it for the viewer to decide whether it's their environment that has dulled their souls, or if their lack of spark is why they've found such a dour existence.
Sadly, the ending gets increasingly preposterous and the plot stops making sense. Worse, and this may be due to my ignorance of Japanese culture, but I thought the film lost track of what it was trying to say. It ends on a moment of beauty but it's delivered with little more than a shrug.
