An e-seller is doxxed and absurd retaliation ensues in the Japanese director's latest intriguing, unconventional genre foray.

The erratic, prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa ("Pulse," "Cure") has, at his best, a singular genius for finding the strangeness — often the malignancy — that gathers like dust in the dark corners of banal modern life. With "Cloud," just announced as Japan's international Oscar submission, the filmmaker gives that impulse a compellingly enigmatic update, making an offbeat Internet-age drama that spirals into a revenge action movie so deconstructed it's almost existentially abstract: Beckett gives you both.

The fulcrum between the film’s two modes is Yoshii (a wonderfully watchable Masaki Suda), who also operates in a dual register. In real life, he’s a competent if disinterested garment factory worker; online he goes by the name “Ratel” and runs a shady resale gang that’s his real focus and his real moneymaker. As “Cloud” opens, Yoshii is inspecting a batch of “therapy machines” that need to be sold quickly by their desperate manufacturer. In passing, he offers the man a price for all 30 units that’s less than what he’ll later ask for just one—take it or leave it. The man takes it, despite his indignant wife’s protests. Yoshii drives off with his bagged haul, advertises it that same night, and watches, with the only glimmer of genuine pleasure we’ll ever see him display, as the listings go from for sale to pending to sold one by one. In a matter of minutes he has made tens of thousands of dollars, but like any gambler his satisfaction is short-lived. The itch for the next score must be satisfied.

Yoshii has a girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), whose flighty materialism he indulges without ever letting her know how much his income really is. And he has a former reseller mentor in Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), whom he quickly outgrows. Yoshii’s still waters are gentle at first glance, but there are undercurrents of greed and ego churning beneath his placid surface, and so when his boss at the factory offers him a promotion just after his big windfall, Yoshii instead dismisses him rather dismissively. And when Muraoka suggests they team up on a new venture, he declines again. Instead, Yoshii doubles down on his solo e-sales instincts and moves out of his cramped apartment into a spacious, secluded lakeside house that he pretends to Akiko is a lifestyle choice but is really just a larger base of operations. He even hires local boy Sano (Daiken Okudaira) as an assistant for his growing business, on the condition that he never, ever touches Yoshii's computer.