Kuraudo

Adept at tuning into the uncanny shadow worlds lurking within modernity, Kurosawa Kiyoshi delves this time into a mundane aspect of 21st-century life to explore new depths in chaotic humanity. Yoshii (Masaki Suda) re-sells merchandise on the Internet, buying up surpluses of dolls or medical equipment to auction off to faceless bidders online. But the quality of his goods is sometimes shoddy, and his fellow hustlers in this online demimonde band together to track him down and exact vengeance. Their messy pursuit makes for an unsettling thriller about desperate venality and vigilante justice, in which everyone seems to be channelling their most reckless urges. Riding the weird energy of Internet-enabled group dynamics, the story follows their violent attacks on Yoshii but also lingers on his grey-condo life with his profoundly unhappy girlfriend—a study in mercenary isolation. Nobody can match Kurosawa at imbuing a room with menace and unease, but he also stirs in other genres with a surprise yakuza veteran and a classic good-and-evil struggle for the soul. It’s a film that lands as both an unpredictable look at DIY criminality and an evocation of a societal madness that’s not total fantasy. (Nicolas Rapold)

Kurosawa Kiyoshi: SWEET HOME (1989), THE GUARD FROM UNDERGROUND (1992), CURE (1997), LICENSE TO LIVE (1998), CHARISMA (1999), BARREN ILLUSION (1999), PULSE (2001), BRIGHT FUTURE (2003), DOPPELGANGER (2003), LOFT (2005), RETRIBUTION (2006), TOKYO SONATA (2008), REAL (2013), SEVENTH CODE (2013), JOURNEY TO THE SHORE (2015), CREEPY (2016), DAGUERROTYPE (2016), BEFORE WE VANISH (2017), FOREBODING (2017), TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH (2019), WIFE OF A SPY (2020), CHIME (2024), SERPENT‘S PATH (2024)