The ‘Serpent’s Paths’: Kiyoshi Kurosawa revisits the horrors of child trafficking
New York’s Japan Cuts festival plays host to a lo-fi 1998 Japanese thriller and its 2024 French remake
Ko Shibasaki as Sayako and Damien Bonnard as Albert in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's remake of "Serpent's Path."
IndieLisboa International Film Festival
Words by Siddhant Adlakha
In 1998, during a speed-run of nearly a dozen other theatrical and direct-to-video films, burgeoning horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa released the seedy 16mm Japanese revenge thriller, Serpent’s Path. Years later, French studio Cinefrance offered Kurosawa the chance to remake it, resulting in a digitally shot, thematically tilt-shifted saga with the same title (or La Voie du serpent), this time set in Paris. The bilingual 2024 remake and its late ‘90s original make for a fascinating double feature, as movies entangled on a quantum level, but which approach their tales from opposing vantage points.
You can watch the latter without the context of its predecessor, but experiencing both in unison reveals a richer study of Kurosawa’s approach. In the 1998 movie, his signature, withdrawn-to-the-point-of-austere observations—as seen in his recent tech thriller Cloud—gradually reveal the contours of a child trafficking saga, and, by the end, the true and twisted nature of its serpentine characters. However, the 2024 version tips its hand much earlier and more overtly, forcing a different kind of moral confrontation within the very same confines.
The original, which begins with a POV shot from a moving car slithering through a winding street, follows grieving father Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa) and his cool, mysterious helping hand Nijima (Show Aikawa)—an advanced math teacher—as they kidnap a man in broad daylight, and chain him up in a warehouse (the first of several men they abduct). Miyashita keeps returning to a home video of his late daughter Emi (Ayami Oda), which he also plays for his kidnapped prey, as he ritualistically narrates each and every gut-churning wound that was discovered on her disfigured corpse. The men he holds captive are, he believes, members of a crime syndicate—possibly a corner of the Yakuza—who were directly or indirectly involved in Emi’s death. The interrogation of each man leads him to another, as he hopes to find the people ultimately responsible, though he’s easily swayed by each individual’s testimony.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's original 1998 "Serpent's Path" is a revenge thriller set in Japan.
Janus Films
Lurking in the background, Nijima appears to have his own motives for alternately guiding and manipulating Miyashita. But we mostly learn about the erudite educator through scenes of him tutoring a young prodigy—a girl around Emi’s age—in complicated mathematical formulae that hint towards some inexplicable higher, perhaps even metaphysical understanding. The film provides no answers to these alphanumeric riddles (which we see sketched out not only on blackboards, but on cobbled streets), but they add to the story’s uncanny quality, as Miyashita is pulled deeper into a conspiracy, and we discover the horrifying nature of what befell his family.
By the end of the original Serpent’s Path, the truth behind every character comes to light, in a story where even tempting, vengeful violence is presented as too futile to undo the horrors wrought by human hands. It’s a lo-fi, low-budget masterwork in the vein of neo-noir, with textured shadows acting like mirrors, hiding and revealing uncomfortable facets of humanity, and the allure of brutality when it’s given a righteous face. The remake, however, is lit more evenly, because in its version of events, no one seems to hide—perhaps because no one can.
Unfolding in the quietest corners of Paris, the 2024 movie sees mourning father Albert (Damien Bonnard) assisted in his quest by steely psychiatrist Sayako (Ko Shibasaki), a Japanese expat well-versed in French, who controls their kidnapping plans rather than merely guiding them from the backdrop. The film doesn’t demand foreknowledge of the original, but the pretext of the 1998 version—and what it reveals about the plot, and about Nijima—further informs Bonnard and Shibasaki’s screen presence. Albert is much more hesitant than Miyashita, despite having experienced a similar tragedy, while Sayako’s motives live much closer to the surface. She’s practically the film’s protagonist too, drawing the viewer’s eye with her eerie stillness, as an outsider who only speaks her own language in the rare moments she’s around one of her inquisitive Japanese patients (a brief but memorable appearance by Shin Ultraman and Drive My Car’s and Hidetoshi Nishijima).
The differences in plot are limited to minor details, especially those that come to light in the final act, but the overarching structure remains the same. The duo kidnaps one man at a time, chains him up in a remote location, and toys with him sadistically until he gives them clues as to who to track down next. But in the case of La Voie du serpent, the ostensible conspiracy (and Albert’s relationship to it) is made explicit from the word go, as though Kurosawa had designed the film with viewers of the original in mind—as though there would be no use in hiding details to which the audience is savvy.
Damien Bonnard and Ko Shibasaki in "Serpent's Path" (2024).
IndieLisboa International Film Festival
In the process, it becomes less a film about compartmentalizing violence, and the way grief twists people’s souls—as the original was—and more its own beast that forces you to confront every layer of the movie’s tragedy all at once. There’s a sense of inevitability to what the story eventually reveals, foreshadowed lucidly throughout as Sayako schemes her way to the top of a criminal structure with her own not-so-secret plan, and with Albert in tow as a willing assistant.
And yet, what remains completely surprising is how effective the remake is, regardless of knowing its in and outs. In its final act, as its walls close in on the characters, they close in on the audience too, making for a horrifying, inescapable house of horrors. Together, both versions of Serpent’s Path form an Ouroboros of cruelty, each one focusing on a different dimension of the same story, and proving that international remakes across borders needn’t simply be tilt-shifted retreads.
Published on July 30, 2025
Words by Siddhant Adlakha
Siddhant Adlakha is a critic and filmmaker from Mumbai, though he now lives in New York City. They're more similar than you'd think. Find him at @SiddhantAdlakha on Twitter