Update: the first poster for and a new image from Serpent’s Path are below, courtesy Cinefil, which lists the French release date as June 14. Sounds like a Cannes premiere to us!
Few directors loom over 2024 like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who’s expected to debut two films these next twelve months. We just learned of Chime, a genre-bending Japanese feature, and for some time have anticipated Serpent’s Path, a remake of his (fantastic) 1998 horror thriller that’s set to star Damien Bonnard (Asteroid City, Staying Vertical) and Ko Shibasaki (The Boy and the Heron). Today brings a major update courtesy the financier Tax Shelter, who’ve shared three stills featuring Mathieu Amalric (previously of Kurosawa’s Daguerrotype) and Claire Denis regular Grégoire Colin, while further digging has revealed the involvement of Michaël Vander-Meiren.
Though it had been reported this new Serpent’s Path (perhaps officially subtitled La vengeance du serpent) would be female-led, Tax Shelter’s synopsis suggests familiar details: a father’s (Bonnard) quest for revenge aided by psychiatrist (Shibasaki). Room for expansion and change could be read into this one paragraph, even if the listed 90-minute runtime would only make a five-minute difference from 1998.
You can find it and the stills below as we await word of a premiere:
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.
