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.
Published as part of Japan Cuts 2025.
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