Serpent’s Path

『蛇の道』 
Hebi No Michi

East Coast Premiere—Q&A with Kiyoshi Kurosawa. A higher budget remake of Kurosawa’s 1998 straight-to-video effort, Serpent’s Path presents a variation on the original, supplanting Tokyo for the overcast banlieues of Paris while swapping genders with its clinical protagonist and adding new narrative depths despite overtly, if not eerily, echoing its predecessor. Kidnapping an associate of a purported child-trafficking organization ominously named The Circle, Albert (Damien Bonnard) seeks retribution for the death of his child, and enacts his cruel vengeance with the aid of physician Sayoko (Ko Shibasaki). The snaking narrative of Kurosawa’s psychological experiment has been told once before, yet its pathway differs ever so slightly. With haunting precision, Serpent’s Path suggests that the destination remains incontrovertibly the same.

Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024, 113 min, DCP, color, in French with English subtitles. With Ko Shibasaki, Damien Bonnard, Mathieu Amalric, Hidetoshi Nishijima. 

Part of JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film 2025
July 10—20, 2025

JAPAN CUTS is the largest showcase of contemporary Japanese cinema in North America and an annual highlight of New York’s cinema scene.

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