“Who are you?” the enigmatic young man central to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 breakthrough horror thriller, “Cure,” repeatedly asks. He’s been accused of hypnotizing people and prompting them to commit gruesome murders.

That deceptively simple question might be the paramount concern in the cinema of Kurosawa, the prolific Japanese filmmaker whose unnerving, genre-defying films are often preoccupied with questioning or revealing the true identity of their characters — to us and to them.

One could say that Kurosawa is to psychological fright what David Cronenberg is to body horror.

In “Charisma” (1999), about a detective stranded in a rural community obsessed with a singular tree, he asks what makes some people special and others just ordinary. In “Cure” (streaming on the Criterion Channel), he ponders whether the victims of hypnosis are innate killers or coerced puppets. And in his chilling 2001 internet ghost story “Pulse” (streaming on Tubi), his young characters wonder if they are alone or just lonely.

In each of these narratives, the weight of society influences the individual. Kurosawa seems perpetually interested in that tug of war between our free will and the status quo. The supernatural or eerie elements often read like catalysts that incite an inner reckoning.

For his most recent techno saga, “Cloud” (in theaters), the filmmaker zeros in on Yoshii (Masaki Suda), an unscrupulous online reseller and factory worker dreaming of upward mobility. To reach his desired financial status, Yoshii scams and undercuts vendors and clients. Those he has harmed, however, eventually plot their revenge.

But the violent retribution that comes his way is not proportionate to his crime. He’s being punished not only for what he did, but for how he made his victims feel.

“Cloud” brings to the foreground Kurosawa’s particular relationship with the evils of technology. The melancholic “Pulse” deals with specters that interact with our world via computers to escape the solitude of the afterlife. The concept inspired a less-compelling American remake, released in 2006, starring Kristen Bell.

Though one might assume Kurosawa has cautious reservations about the digital realm, he chose to release the 2024 short film “Chime,” about a culinary educator tormented by a sound, as an NFT (nonfungible token), heavily limiting who can access it.

Watching one of Kurosawa’s movies, the only certainty is that at any given point the story can take a turn into unexpected, even absurd places. A cinematic shape-shifter, Kurosawa started out in the 1980s making so-called pink films — independently produced erotic fictions — followed by a stint creating direct-to-video action movies.

It was with “Cure,” starring the actor Koji Yakusho, that Kurosawa’s use of genre tropes with a philosophical edge first garnered international attention. Since then, the director has cast Yakusho, also the lead in Wim Wenders’s recent Oscar-nominated drama “Perfect Days,” on multiple occasions. If Kurosawa has a muse, it’s undoubtedly Yakusho.

In that first collaboration, Yakusho played a troubled detective whose involvement in the hypnotist’s case unearths his own unflattering shortcomings. Later, he was a detective in “Charisma” who, more than once, is tasked with choosing between saving a singular life or protecting the collective.

Then there’s the 2003 film “Doppelgänger” (on Kanopy), in which Yakusho plays a shy engineer whose look-alike behaves questionably and usurps his life. And in “Retribution” (available on demand), from 2006, he appears as an investigator working on a series of homicides, one of which he might be responsible for.

Even in Kurosawa’s films that are not explicitly genre escapades, the idea of a conflicted identity remains a consistent theme.

The 2008 ensemble drama “Tokyo Sonata” (streaming on Tubi) follows four members of a family in the Japanese capital as they grapple with the disconnect between who they wish they were and who they really are. In the more recent “To the Ends of the Earth” (streaming on Fawesome), a Japanese woman longs to follow her passion for singing while working as the host of a travel program. And in the 2003 film “Bright Future” (streaming on Ovid), the volatility of impressionable youth is explored through a horrific crime that upends the life of an aimless young man.

The divide between older generations and younger ones rebelling against outdated thinking intrigues Kurosawa. That sentiment is also present in “Cloud” between Yoshii and his boss at his factory job. The boss still believes in longstanding loyalty to the same, reliable occupation, as the honest way for economic advancement.

Over the past three decades, Kurosawa has directed nearly 30 feature films, sometimes debuting two or three projects in the same year. That he writes or co-writes all of his movies makes his output even more impressive. Kurosawa has made films about spies, aliens who take over human bodies, apparitions and all manner of unsettling encounters.

And yet, what’s most terrifying for many of the protagonists of his twisted stories is realizing they are not the person they thought they were.