Serpent’s Path

Immediately after CURE, his international breakthrough, Kiyoshi Kurosawa directed two low-budget films—SERPENT’S PATH and EYES OF THE SPIDER—using the same basic premise and the same lead actor to completely different ends. The first, SERPENT’S PATH (1998, later remade in 2024), is a dark gangland thriller with philosophical overtones. Obsessed with avenging his young daughter’s murder, yakuza subordinate Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa) recruits Nijima (Sho Aikawa), a brilliant yet strangely detached math teacher, to help carry out a scheme to kidnap and torture the man allegedly responsible. But the plan goes awry when their target, Otsuki (Yurei Yanagi), fingers another mobster as the mastermind behind Miyashita’s tragedy. As the two partners ascend the yakuza chain of command in search of the true culprit, Miyashita and Nijima follow the cold, calculating logic of revenge, descending into a moral abyss from which they may never surface. Featuring Kurosawa’s patented long takes and claustrophobic arrangement of space, SERPENT’S PATH is one of the legendary director’s most chilling investigations into evil and the endless cycle of violence.

Starring Teruyuki Kagawa, Show Aikawa, Yûrei Yanagi