Serpent’s Path (2024) | Japanese Film Festival 2025

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Date Reviewed: 05/12/2025

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path slithers uneasily across moral ground so unstable it seems to shift beneath the viewer’s feet. Though framed as a revenge thriller — a grieving father, an unthinkable crime, a shadowy network known only as “The Circle” — the film dissolves that simplicity almost immediately. What emerges instead is a study of emotional displacement, of grief so total it mutates into something feral, and of the strange power dynamics that arise when violence becomes a language between strangers.

The film opens with an image that looks at first like a photograph: static, silent, drained of colour. Only the cars drifting in the background reveal its living pulse. This is Kurosawa’s way of sliding us into a world where stillness is deceptive, where truth hides beneath flat surfaces. Sayoko (Ko Shibasaki) appears almost spectrally, her heels clicking sharply on the pavement — the first of many reminders that she moves through space with self-possession, even authority, that far surpasses the grieving father she accompanies. Albert (Damien Bonnard), hunched and muted, clings to the only thing he has left: a small, innocent video of his daughter playing the piano, its soft brightness clashing violently with the dull, grey palette of the world he now inhabits.

The early kidnapping sequence — executed with unnerving calm by Sayoko and Albert — sets the tone for the film’s visual logic. Kurosawa frames violence in static, wide compositions, allowing the brutality to seep through the edges rather than burst out in spectacle. The room where they confine Laval, their first captive, is tiled, dim, lit by half-covered windows that filter light into jaundiced yellows and sallow greens. The colours feel sick, as if the building itself has absorbed the rot of whatever occurred there before.

What becomes immediately clear is that Sayoko and Albert do not share the same motivation, even if they appear aligned. Albert burns with grief; Sayoko holds something colder, a psychological acuity that borders on the predatory. She moves through scenes with an unsettling stillness — a doctor, a therapist, a figure of care who wields her calmness like a blade. Her sessions with a Japanese patient, Mr Yoshimura, reveal her dual nature: soft-voiced, attentive, yet shadowed by unspoken depths. The sterile yellow cabinets of her office glow with artificial warmth that never reaches her eyes.

As interrogations unfold, Kurosawa refuses any straightforward line between truth and manipulation. The men they abduct — Laval, then Guérin, then Christian/François — contradict one another, contradict themselves, contradict reality. Each new revelation only destabilises the last. By the time the film jumps backward three months to reveal how Albert and Sayoko met, the viewer is already caught in the film’s serpentine structure: doubling back, looping, shedding skins of meaning.

Kurosawa’s Paris is depicted as a landscape of empty facades — industrial warehouses, cluttered archives, abandoned fairgrounds where cruelty hides in plain sight. Even nature feels uncanny: the country cabin bathed in unreal green, the grass dotted with yellow flowers as kidnappers drag a man through it like a grotesque pastoral tableau.

Through it all, the most disturbing force is not the violence but Sayoko’s quiet influence. Her power grows precisely because she never raises her voice. She suggests scapegoats. She stages psychological theatre. She pushes Albert deeper into his grief, shaping his rage rather than soothing it. The serpents in this film are not the men who confess, contradict, and cower; it is the calm. The soft voice. The stillness.

By the final act — a labyrinthine warehouse drenched in red shadow and flickering screens of Albert’s daughter — reality has collapsed entirely. The film dissolves into a nightmare of surveillance images, disembodied voices, and the overwhelming question of whose story is being told and whose pain is being used.

What lingers is not the brutality but the emotional dislocation: the way grief becomes translatable, transferable, even exploitable. Kurosawa remakes his own film not by updating the plot but by shifting its gravitational centre. With Sayoko, he introduces a character who embodies ambiguity itself — caregiver and manipulator, victim and perpetrator.

Review by Scarlet Thomas