Erratic, prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has, at his best, a peculiar genius for finding strangeness — often malevolence — gathering like dust in the shadowy corners of banal modern life. With “Cloud,” which has just been announced as Japan’s International Oscar submission, the filmmaker gives that impulse a compellingly enigmatic update, turning in an offbeat internet-age drama that devolves into a vengeance actioner so deconstructed it’s almost existentially abstract: Beckett giving it both barrels.

The hinge between the film’s two modes is Yoshii (a terrifically watchable Masaki Suda) who also operates in a double register. In real life a competent, if disengaged menial worker in a clothing factory, online, he goes by the handle “Ratel” and runs a shady reselling racket that is his real focus and his real moneymaker. As “Cloud” begins, Yoshii is inspecting a consignment of “therapy machines” up for quick sale by their desperate manufacturer.