Serpent’s Path Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Puts a Fresh Spin on His Psychological Thriller

There are several reasons a director can decide to remake their own work. It could be an instance of having greater resources and being more confident in your skills, as was the case with Alfred Hitchcock revisiting The Man Who Knew Too Much. For William Wyler, the decision to re-adapt the play The Children’s Hour in 1961 allowed him to more accurately reflect the queer themes inherent to the original text that were snuffed out in his original 1936 adaptation (getting to work with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn on the second run probably didn’t hurt). Or for Michael Haneke, an English-language shot-for-shot riff on his Funny Games a decade after he first brought the story to screen gave an added layer to thematic provocations. 

When French producers approached Kiyoshi Kurosawa about remaking one of his own features, the answer for him was obvious: Serpent’s Path. Released in 1998, the original project was part of a duo of V-Cinema productions made simultaneously, shot fast and cheap over the course of two weeks (the other was Eyes of the Spider). Despite those limitations, it’s an absolute scorcher of a picture (and has recently received a 4K restoration from Janus, which Nick Newman spoke with Kurosawa about), unraveling a knotty narrative in which a man and his schoolteacher friend abduct and torture a low-level yakuza member in pursuit of vengeance over the murder of the man’s daughter. Anyone familiar with Kurosawa’s canon will feel his trademarks all over the film, which he directed from a script by Hiroshi Takahashi (writer of Ringu, released the same year). With this offer, though, he saw an opportunity to revisit Serpent’s Path while fashioning it more distinctly in his own voice. 

Transplanting the action from Tokyo to Paris, the new Serpent’s Path is fairly faithful to its predecessor in terms of story beats. Albert (Damien Bonnard) joins forces with Japanese psychiatrist Sayoko (Ko Shibasaki), with the latter being a gender-flipped interpretation of the previous schoolteacher role. The film kicks off with them abducting Laval (a brilliant weasel of a performance from Mathieu Amalric), a low-level accountant for the company Minard, whose employees are secretly involved in a child-trafficking organization known as The Circle. Laval’s interrogation takes place in the kind of decrepit, abandoned warehouse we’ve seen in much of Kurosawa’s work, and with the aid of deeper shadows and sharper framing from cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine (who worked with the director on his previous French-language feature, Daguerrotype), the palpable sense of terror is turned up further from the very beginning. Serpent’s Path is the type of film that makes you want a shower afterwards, the hours spent in the muck of this environment and the psychology of these characters taking a toll on your spirit. 

There are two symbiotic forces at play here. One is an evisceration of men like Laval and his cohorts (played by Slimane Dazi and Claire Denis regular Grégoire Colin), pathetic mongrels who waste no time in throwing their pals under the bus in order to spare their own lives when they know what the future holds, chained to this wall and forced to defecate on the same floor off which they’ll be eating. There’s little chance of evading death here, but better to take the shot at passing the buck onto someone else and see if they can take the fall instead. After all, you were just a middleman following orders. 

The pulsing momentum of Serpent’s Path is its tale of revenge—a mission driven by rage with no hope for resolution in sight. As we chart this labyrinthine course to get to those ultimately responsible, Albert and Sayoko reflect two very different approaches. While Albert is consistently frantic, the disheveled visage of a father consumed by the devastating loss of his child, Sayoko is eerily composed. Apart from surface differences such as language and the gender of its protagonist, the greatest difference in the two Serpent’s Path films is that the remake expands upon Sayoko’s life, including an extensive side plot in which she treats Yoshimura (Drive My Car’s Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Japanese man living in Paris who is suffering from extreme culture shock in being removed from his home and his people. Wisely, Kurosawa sticks true to himself by never spelling out the details of this story, maintaining Sayoko’s ambiguity while offering tantalizing teases as to what her stake in this ultimately is. 

Ko Shibasaki is a force of nature as Sayoko, delivering expertly calibrated menace and simmering rage. She’s ultimately the center of Serpent’s Path, with her motivations coming to the forefront in a stunning final act that marvelously pays off the mounting dread that Kurosawa methodically builds over the course of the film. With stronger formal panache on display, this remake maintains the power of its predecessor while offering greater development in its characters and a few surprises along the way, even for those familiar with its story. 

Serpent’s Path opens in theaters on Friday, September 11.