By the 14th or so day of a film festival after four films a day, it gets to a point where you are hoping your 9.30pm film will have a little bit of pace and drama and action to keep you awake.

I was pretty sure that Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud would give me all of that and more. I have only seen one of his films before, Wife of a Spy, which I didn’t super love, but coincidentally had planned to come down the weekend before the festival to see some Japanese horror films at ACMI, and one of them was Cure (1997) and the other was Pulse (2001). After watching Cloud, I now want to see them even more.

It’s an interesting story in that it starts off pretty benignly. Ryôsuke (Masaki Suda) is a buyer and seller of things, an occupation that didn’t exist in the same way 10 years ago. It is almost an addiction for him, talking his way into purchasing items at a discounted price that he then sells for 10 times that. You can see he feels he has an eye for what will sell, and how to make items feel special online even when they are dubious in their provenance.

Ryôsuke has a girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), who really just wants to have money to be able to buy things – is she so different to him? Perhaps she is because she feels no need to work for it, but then again, we’re not sure we can call what he does work.

As he becomes more successful, he quits his boring job, blows off dubious friends, and rents a big house in an isolated area for him and Akiko. But then strange things start to go wrong. It looks like someone is trying to harm him, or some people, and he grows increasingly paranoid that his life is in danger.

The film shifts into a different gear about halfway through as Ryôsuke’s paranoia starts to manifest as reality. You need to suspend disbelief a little bit, but in a way that is kind of knowing and enjoyable. We know we are being sold a story for our entertainment.

It gradually moves from ordinary and benign to an increasingly tense and gory action film, and the transformation of Ryôsuke is satisfying, although it’s possible that any ruthlessness was always there. There is an element of silliness to it, but also traces of other films and genre – a little bit Western, a little bit gangster, a little bit Reservoir Dogs – but with this underlying story arc of a bumbling and ordinary man who doesn’t think he’s a monster being faced with the fact that maybe he is.

Ultimately, it was thoroughly enjoyable late night fare with perhaps a moral message that is underlined in a slightly surreal final shot.