Safe to say few movies this year engender more excitement than Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path, a remake of his superb, bad-vibes 1998 thriller. Though an expected Cannes debut didn’t come to pass, the film releases in France on June 14; we now have a trailer that shows the known cast members (Damien Bonnard, Mathieu Amalric, and Ko Shibasaki) with the pleasant surprise of Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima (previously of Kurosawa’s Loft, Creepy, and License to Live), and though enthusiasts of the original will spot bare bones of its revenge plot, quick shots imply scenes and scenarios not in Kurosawa’s original. News of U.S. acquisition already feels overdue.
Here’s the synopsis: “An intense desire for revenge fills Albert Bacheret: his daughter Marie. This father, exalted by violence, joins forces with Sayoko, to find and kill the culprits one by one. But at the same time, Sayoko leads her own mission of revenge which risks turning against Albert at any moment… Sayoko Mijima, a Japanese therapist based in Paris, helps Albert Bacheret find the murderer of his eight-year-old daughter who was killed by members of the Circle, a mysterious association involved in the trafficking of children’s organs. Together, they kidnap several suspects in turn and lock them in a warehouse to extract information from them. Between the quest for truth and the thirst for revenge, the duo will soon find themselves locked in a vicious spiral.”
Find preview and poster below, and read my 2021 interview with Kurosawa:
