Serpent’s Path

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is our great purveyor of modern ennui, a chronicler of creeping existential dread as the world we have created now threatens to engulf us at every turn. Justly famous for horror films like Cure and Pulse, Kiyoshi has also wrung eerie, ominous vibes out of environmentalism (Charisma), nature run amok (Bright Future), stranger-in-a-strange-land travelogues (To the Ends of the Earth), World War II (The Wife of a Spy), and alien invasions (Before We Vanish). He’s even made a film in France before (Daguerreotype), where he has now returned for a new, updated version of Serpent’s Path, which turns out to be a fairly faithful remake of his 1998 film of the same name. Faithful, yes, but still different, expanded now in fascinating, oblique ways. 

The earlier version, one of several V-Cinema titles that Kiyoshi knocked out that same year, came right between the higher profile Cure, in 1997, and Charisma, in 1999 (his productivity is legendary). 1998’s Serpent’s Path follows Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa), a grieving father who enlists Nijima (Show Aikawa) to help him track down and torture the gangsters who murdered his daughter. It’s a deeply disturbing odyssey through some very dark material, even if there is little on-screen gore, and the low budgets of the V-Cinema era (the Japanese equivalent of straight-to-video) give the film an appropriately grey, grungy aesthetic. 

Fast forward almost three decades, and this new Serpent’s Path moves the narrative from Japan to France, and follows Albert (Damien Bonnard) and Sayoko (Kô Shibasaki), occupying the roles of Miyashita and Nijima, respectively. The film begins as they are just about to abduct Laval (Mathieu Amalric), a mid-level accountant for a mysterious cabal embedded within a multinational corporation that is hiding a horrifying secret. The duo succeeds in kidnapping Laval, driving him to an abandoned warehouse space in the middle of nowhere and chaining him to a wall. They refuse to let him use a bathroom, instead periodically blasting him with a water hose, and dump food in front of him, forcing him to eat it off of the floor with his hands. Albert frequently wheels a TV in front of Laval and plays home movie footage of his young daughter, while simultaneously reading the police report detailing her death in a quiet, monotone voice, like a nightmarish mantra. It’s all unnervingly hypnotic, shot in an even, steady tone by Kiyoshi and cinematographer Alex Kavyrchine. Albert’s jittery, nervous demeanor contrasts sharply with Sayako’s steely, calm resolve and Laval’s incessant pleading. It’s not long before Laval figures out that to save his own skin, he has to convince his captors that someone else is responsible for the daughter’s death. He starts naming names, and Albert and Sayako begin hunting other potential predators. 

So far, Kurosawa’s new Serpent’s Path is largely a beat-for-best replica of the original version, but the director and co-writer Aurélien Ferenczi begin to complicate the scenario in subtle ways. Previously, Nijima was a math professor of some sort, and scenes of him instructing students on complex theoretical equations suggested a kind of hidden logic operating beneath the surface of the otherwise straightforward revenge story. Here, Sayoko is a psychiatrist, and flashbacks reveal that she first met Albert in the immediate aftermath of his child’s death. Other scenes of her at work introduce an entirely new character, a Japanese immigrant played by Kiyoshi regular (probably most recognizable as the star of arthouse hit Drive My Car) Hidetoshi Nishijima. Over the course of several conversations, we learn that the man has been in France for several years but has not learned the language and feels extremely isolated and lonely, so much so that it is starting to manifest itself in severe physical symptoms. Meanwhile, other new scenes with no equivalent in the 1998 version include various Zoom calls between Sayoko and a man we eventually learn is her estranged husband, who has at some point returned to Japan and is now trying to gently persuade her to return as well. 

These brief glimpses of Sayoko’s life outside of her work with Albert open up all sorts of fruitful avenues for speculation as to her ultimate motives. She’s determined to do these terrible things with Albert, but why? Regardless of such answers, the duo’s body count increases and the conspiracy at the heart of the matter comes into sharper view, even as it remains slightly vague, like an image that refuses to snap into focus. Albert descends further and further into a kind of confused fugue state, leading to a final reveal that feels like a knife in the gut. Kurosawa ends the film with a fierce gaze aimed directly at the audience — his cinema of 21st century malaise has gone global, a whole host of fresh atrocities visited upon us that are aided and abetted by the anonymity of the Internet (in this sense, at least, Serpent’s Path would make for a magnificent bad vibes double feature with Red Rooms). It’s a big, wide world out there, and the evil that men do has permeated it all. — DANIEL GORMAN

Blazing Fists

“I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the world of funerals, and the other was Blazing Fists, Takashi Miike’s kickboxing movie. The surprise, then, is that only one of them made me tear up, and it wasn’t the one boasting all the funerals. Blazing Fists — or Blue Fight, according to its on-screen English title; or possibly even Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors, as Wikipedia dubs it — is the kind of movie Miike makes every once in awhile (as with 2019’s First Love) to remind viewers that despite his audacious weirdness…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — SEAN GILMAN

Teki Cometh

Daihachi Yoshida’s black-and-white character study Teki Cometh follows the daily routines and ruminations of retired French literature professor Gisuke Watanabe (Kyôzô Nagatsuka). Divided into four seasonal sections — beginning with summer and ending somewhat ironically with the season of renewal, spring — the film’s first third mostly depicts the widowed and existentially troubled Daihachi in solitude, quietly preparing simple meals and writing articles for a travel magazine’s culture column. As the film progresses, he interacts more frequently with the rapidly changing external world: he visits colleagues, ex-pupils, doctors, friends, and several women who occupy ambiguous spaces in his fantasies and his life: a former student (Kumi Takiuchi), a young undergraduate (Yumi Kawai), and his spectral wife (Asuka Kurosawa). 

Teki Cometh begins in staunchly banal reality, patiently documenting Gisuke’s routines sans diegetic music. In tandem with its movement from summer into the succeeding seasons, the film becomes increasingly ambiguous, and ultimately, quietly surreal. It doesn’t descend so much as it retracts into Gisuke’s fragmenting psyche, and it announces this retraction with the arrival of bizarre messages on Gisuke’s computer, which portend an invasive wave of dangerous refugees and shadowy government cover-ups. 

Teki Cometh faces a representational dilemma in its movement from routine stability to narrative breakdown: namely, where does the protagonist’s interior life end and the object “real world” begin? Based on a 1998 novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka, the film is hampered by its cinematic medium’s limitations: it lacks literature’s unique, psychological expansiveness and immersion, and its inner logic somehow becomes both curiously opaque and overly literal. 

With its psychological focus, seasonal chapter headings, black-and-white photography, and occasional SnorriCam shots, Teki Cometh abstractly recalls Darren Aronofsky’s first two features. Aronofsky’s black-and-white debut, Pi, also tracks an intellectual’s mental breakdown, and his second feature, Requiem for a Dream, uses seasonal chapter headings in its SnorriCam-peppered depiction of psychological disintegration. However, unlike Aronofsky’s divisive early features, Teki Cometh lacks narrative propulsion and distinct formal perspective. Depicted with a kind of level-eyed indifference, Gisuke’s accumulating uncertainties result in a plot that feels lost, even inert.

Steeped in literary references and entrenched in the increasingly vexed problems of a “post-truth” contemporary world corroded by social media algorithms and reactionary politics, the film is not without ideas. It gestures often at social commentary, but it fails to localize its emotional center. Teki Cometh is ably shot and directed, and it features an array of solid performances (Kumi Takiuchi and Yumi Kawai are the understated standouts). However, as it sinks into Gisuke’s mind, it pushes the viewer out. The lingering effect is nothing so much as a distant sense of uninvested bewilderment. — MIKE THORN

Yasuko, Songs of Days Past

“Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be profitable in the late ‘70s: the Roman porno genre. His young compatriots at the company saw artistic opportunity in the freedom this studio gave them for their erotic thrillers and comedies, but Negishi’s successes at the studio (such as 1979’s Wet Weekend and 1981’s Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon) led to even mainstream appeal. Similar-minded (and similarly successful) directors banded together with an experimental venture called the Director’s Company which, like the Art Theatre Guild before it, promised avant-garde Japanese filmmaking in a period of severe economic downturn in the nation’s film industry…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — ZACH LEWIS

The Gesuidouz

Chop wood, carry water. The well is running dry for the titular noise punk band of Ken’ichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz. Their shows in their hometown of Tokyo are yielding crowds of twos, poor sales of their latest album have landed them $20,000 in debt with their label, and their blowhard manager (Yuya Endo) is losing his patience. He gives them an ultimatum: move out to a rural farm with subsidized housing and pump out a hit between sowing the fields, or hang up the studded hat. Gutter punks to the end, The Gesuidouz leave the office fuming and with middle fingers up, but they’re out of options. They pack up the van and head for the hills. Punk goes country. 

The Gesuidouz is another entry in the crowded canon of tortured-artist stories, but it introduces a rare and healthy dose of ebullience — less Inside Llewyn Davis than the Flight of the Conchords with writer’s block and a chip on their shoulder. It’s a familiar space for Ugana. The young but already prolific director has spent the past few years churning out Fantasia-friendly midnight genre flicks that carve a comfortable niche between B-movie gore and shark-jumping gags. The Gesuidouz, though, largely trades body horror for an absurdist-lite and decidedly sweet examination of the creative process. The band name-checks Dario Argento and William Friedkin; the cast was instructed to study up on the bone-dry punchlines of Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson. 

The Gesuidouz, whose name translates roughly to “sewage,” might cut a tough image at first glance, but they stumble in and out of pratfalls and deadpans as if they’re aspiring toward their own caricatures. It’s a dichotomy that largely works, and many of The Gesuidouz’s jokes let needed air into a genre that often suffocates on its own piety. Masao, a guitarist played by Imamura Leo, nurses an ohagi addiction that efficiently subverts the tired drug arcs that dog so many American rock biopics. A host of winking cameos (including, somehow, Lloyd Kaufman) are jarring enough to skirt meta-fatigued groans and land some giggles with the late-nite Troma crowd. And in the movie’s most inspired visual choice, the band’s lead, Hanako (Natsuko), finally pens a hit by literally vomiting up a wisecracking cassette tape that would have found a welcome home in Peter Jackson’s Braindead. It’s a refreshing direction, but The Gesuidouz’s levity occasionally runs up a tab on the dime of its drive and agency. 

The Scandinavian droll with which Ugani trained his cast often runs counter to its own broad punchlines and punk ethos. The latter of which, admittedly, isn’t all that important — Kohl’s has been selling Sex Pistols graphic tees since the last quarter-century of the Queen’s life — but The Gesuidouz is sorely absent the grit that lets filthy staples like Party Monster and Return of the Living Dead endure. A sanitized swing toward rock and roll is forgivable; Ugani’s movie lands its most critical missteps in tonal malaise. Songwriting is often a matter of sitting around and waiting for something to happen, but The Gesuidouz’s 93 minutes can only spin so many goofball expressions and slapstick non sequiturs before its tapestry starts to feel a bit thin. 

But while its comedy might be inconsistent, The Gesuidouz hits its stride when it stops searching for the joke — but never, somehow, at the expense of its lighthearted charm. For Hanako, a hefty bill with the label isn’t the only thing driving the urgency behind the band’s next single. Her walls are adorned with the dead rockstars that came before her — Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious — and on the eve of a milestone birthday, Hanako is convinced she’s destined to become the latest member of the 27 club. Suffering for one’s art has been mythologized to the point of glory, and Hanako holds her impending doom like a dreadful chalice, as if dying young will canonize her legacy in a fashion her songwriting never could. For so many young creatives, pain seems a prerequisite to great art instead of a boundary their heroes have hurdled; that Ugani deconstructs that myth is a gift to whatever young punk might stumble across his movie after hours. 

“How nice of you to come to this shithole!” smiles Tome, the owner of the farm The Gesuidouz visit to pluck weeds and strings. Tome hunches and grins through her fields of leeks and radishes with the end-of-life buoyant wisdom we all aspire to, and if she doesn’t understand the noise punk of her new tenants, she’s at least happy they make it. Tome’s relationship with Hanako is The Gesuidouz’s ace in the hole, the sort of odd-couple friendship we have once or twice in a lifetime if we’re lucky. That the band sounds like shit, to Tome, is irrelevant. “It’s hard for me to understand what’s good about your songs,” she tells a Hanako on the verge of calling it quits, “but it’s amazing to be able to create something that others don’t understand at all.” For the first time in the movie, Hanako smiles. Tomorrow — her 27th birthday — she’ll pick up the pen. — CHRISTIAN CRAIG

Cloud

“Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies of work from a veteran filmmaker, one as dedicated to remixing his own work in late auteur style as he is retaining the fresh experimental bent of a much younger director. Martin Scorsese and Hong Sang-soo may be the only other filmmakers who have also been able to accomplish a similar feat this far into their careers. While Kurosawa’s medium-length film Chime, which made the rounds earlier this year, took its cues from his turn-of-the-century masterpieces Cure and Pulse, distilling them both into a pure expression of unnameable yet deeply resonant dread, Cloud seems like a spiritual sequel…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — SEAN GILMAN

A Samurai in Time

In Japan, the term jidaigeki — literally translating to “period drama” — is typically ascribed to a genre of samurai film, most commonly set during the Edo period (spanning from 1603 to 1868). This movement in film history largely celebrated its heyday between the 1950s and 1970s, where the most notable films emerged from directors Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Masaki Kobayashi. However, much like its English-language counterpart in the Western, the genre is seemingly all but dead today, still produced sparingly but without much fanfare or lasting power. Perhaps it was the advent of digital cinema that laid the genre to rest, as a jidaigeki shot on anything other than film feels slightly wrong, excepting attempts at  something avant-garde or an exercise in late style. Enter writer/director Jun’ichi Yasuda, who attempts to pay reverence and restore some glory to the jidaigeki with A Samurai in Time, an innovative spin on the genre. Funny and light on its feet, the film is first and foremost out to entertain, which allows Yasuda to operate like a kid in a sandbox, melding genres that are very clearly near and dear to his heart.

An opening narration provides some historical context: during the tail-end of the Edo period, Kyoto is embroiled in the Shogunate wars, a period of civil unrest and social upheaval with a military dictatorship running the nation. On the rebellious side are the Satsuma and Choso clans, anti-Shogunate forces fighting to restore imperial power to Japan. Meeting their challenge are special police forces Aizu and Shinsengumi, who protect Shogunate representatives. During a late-night stakeout, Aizu warrior Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi) and a companion encounter Yamagata Hikokuro (Ken Shonozaki), a Choso samurai. When Shinzaemon and Hikokuro draw swords, lightning strikes and Shinzaemon is suddenly transported 140 years in the future, appearing on a film set in modern-day Kyoto. Understandably discombobulated, Shinzaemon makes his way around the production backlot, eventually befriending assistant director Yamamoto Yuko (Yuno Sakura) and taking up residence at a local temple operated by the Chief Priest (Yoshiharu Fukuda). With his period-accurate clothing, haircut, and mastery of the sword, Shinzaemon finds himself work on Yuko’s television production, a jidaigeki series entitled Worry-Not-Reformer. Climbing the ranks from glorified extra to kirareyaku — a type of stunt performer who specializes in being “cut down” on camera for a living — Shinzaemon enjoys his newfound lot in life despite the temporal displacement, until his past inevitably catches up with him to settle an old score.

Part A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, part The Iceman Cometh, and part Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, Yasuda is having a blast pulling from disparate works to bring his feudal sci-fi/comedy to life. A Samurai in Time opens with deadly solemnity before transforming into something considerably more humorous, though Yasuda is wise not to play things too broadly as Shinzaemon becomes a stranger in a strange land. The film finds its firmest footing with the samurai’s adventures on the television set, as he’s initially baffled by the silent nature of background extras and the phony propwork. (One recurring highlight is found in the sound design: any time a sword is unsheathed, it occurs in deadly silence, as it would in real life, without the benefit of any sort of obnoxious shiiing sound effect added in post-production.) Life outside of production work proves to be equally confounding, as Shinzaemon is met with modern electronic appliances, the miracle of television, and the delectable wonders of a typical strawberry cake, which he believes to be a rich delicacy available only to the wealthy. Shinzaemon also spends time honing his skills with the blade by training with Sekimoto (Rantaro Mine), the on-set sword fight choreographer for Worry-Not-Performer, which is a weekly serial about a samurai hero (think Bounty Law with a swordsman instead of a gunman). One could nitpick that Shinzaemon adapts rather too quickly to his unusual predicament, but Yasuda waves away any quibbles with an abundance of frivolity. Also helping the cause is lead actor Yamaguchi, who absolutely kills in the title role, delivering a carefully measured performance that finds a lot of humor in his keen skills of observation.

Halfway through the film, Hikokuro (now played by Norimasa Fuke) re-emerges, having been transported to the future 30 years prior to Shinzaemon and so now appearing as an older man. Like Shinzaemon, Hikokuro bided his time in film work, eventually adopting the moniker Kyoichiro Kazami, who became a renowned star in Japan. Hiring a hotshot director, Kazami announces his return to the filmmaking fold from retirement with a jidaigeki epic, and as an added metatextual bonus, he’s personally hired Shinzaemon to co-star as his mortal enemy on-screen, looking to finish the fight they started centuries ago. Through the lens of the jidaigeki production, Yasuda allows these two rivals to interrogate their place in a world that has long left everything they stood for behind, while also restoring relevance to the jidaigeki and preserving tradition. This all comes to a head in a final showdown, which places real combat in front of an otherwise staged setting with a camera. To say anything more would give away the game, but despite ultimately being a little distended in runtime, A Samurai in Time ends beautifully, guided to a safe landing by Yasuda, who capably balances genres and references with considerable amiability and skill. — JAKE TROPILA

My Sunshine

“It’s perplexing to encounter a film like My Sunshine, the sophomore feature from Japan’s Hiroshi Okuyama. Although the film ends up in a rather somber place, it’s a wholly conventional coming-of-age tale that could reasonably be called Billy Elliot on Ice… As snow begins to fall in a small Japanese town, baseball ends and ice hockey begins. It hardly matters to Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a young lad who is equally poor at both sports. But something surprising happens as he’s leaving the rink…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — MICHAEL SICINSKI