The low-key loser delights of Eephus, Cloud, and Vulcanizadora

For a solid stretch of Vulcanizadora, its title remains as mystifying as Eephus, even if you speak the Spanish necessary to separate it from its protagonists’ rusted-metalhead aesthetic. For the two people marching through the Michigan woods (who both fit into the category “boys over 40”), “Vulcanizadora” seems less like it refers to an actual tire shop and more like it was a random word the pair thought looked cool when they wrote it in the death-metal font of the film’s title card. And even when this haze is lifted and clarity sets in, you don’t feel satisfied. You feel like writer-director Joel Potrykus wants you to feel: Amused, wistful, and stuck mulling over his movie’s Beckettian mix of absurdity and futility.

As Potrykus’ unromantic Midwestern losers mature, so too does his filmmaking. But Vulcanizadora still feels like a natural progression of his slime-slacker milieu: At the movie’s heart, there’s still a ridiculous and upsetting idea, thrust upon desperate members of the lower-middle class, seen through to its tragicomic conclusion. And yet, it’s far more subtle in its images and emotions than the allegorical stuckness of Relaxer or the monstrous swindler of Buzzard, both of which also star Joshua Burge in various states of unravelment.

Here, Burge plays one half of a camping-trip friendship that marches towards a grim fate. Vulcanizadora is a silly and bold movie, and one that frames traditional institutions (ranging from family units to the police) as more horrific than stabilizing. But now a mellow resignation weighs down its man-children, grounding their fully committed idiocy. The only thing you can really count on is that things end. It’s a terrible comfort, but one that Potrykus’ fringe-dwellers cling to with age.

Things inevitably crashing down around you—the divine law of fucking around and subsequently finding out—powers writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud. One of three new movies this year from the Cure and Pulse filmmaker, Cloud clearly divides itself in half. In the first section, Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) scams and swindles online buyers as a reseller, flipping fakes and finding profit where he can. His life occurs in Kurosawa’s Kafka-like gray office dystopia, moving through warehouses and shipping docks. People resent him, or tolerate him only with ulterior motives, like his reselling peers and his clearly gold-digging girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa). It’s a desperate, unsettling life that revolves around the flashing “Sold” marker lighting up an eBay-like screen.

But on the other side of that “Sold” is the buyer. They are the people who drive the two-hour film to its more kinetic second half, pushing a creeping look at a fringe online capitalist into the flesh-and-blood real world. The physical consequences of making money off of faceless usernames on a bidding site crash down around Yoshii in ways both silly and startling, leading to a stand-off that’s never quite as satisfying as Kurosawa’s slow-burn intro. But as the dust settles, it’s hard to see another path forward for those the filmmaker highlights—those trying to carve out a livelihood in this increasingly lonesome world, and those trying to persist without being eaten alive.