The Serpent’s Path – first-look review

If it’s a real­ly, real­ly bad time at the movies that you’re after – and many are! – then you could do a lot worse than see­ing Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s French-lan­guage remake of his own 1998 film about griev­ing father Albert (Damien Bon­nard) who will stop at noth­ing to find those respon­si­ble for the mur­der and muti­la­tion of his eight-year-old daugh­ter. By strange quirk, he’s joined by Japan­ese psy­chother­a­pist Sayoko (Ko Shibasa­ki), who is blind­ly but fer­vent­ly assist­ing him in his oper­a­tion which involves cap­tur­ing and tor­tur­ing the employ­ees and asso­ciates of a shady cor­po­ra­tion called Minard.

It ini­tial­ly feels like Kurosawa’s own take on the beloved Saw fran­chise, in which hap­less vic­tims are under the gun to come up with answers to obscure ques­tions. Yet this is a more tricksy and con­cep­tu­al work, and after a while, the film begins to hint that it might be Sayoko at the cen­tre of this elab­o­rate ploy, and Albert may just be her gorm­less patsy. 

An intrigu­ing sub­plot sees Sayoko attempt to pre­scribe med­ica­tion to a sui­ci­dal patient, who returns to her say­ing that her pre­scrip­tion did not­ing. In his search for answers, Albert is like a patient pass­ing through the metaphor­i­cal tri­al-and-error gaunt­let of sooth­ing balms, place­bos and heavy duty tran­quil­lis­ers, pluck­ing out his next tar­get to see if they con­tain some spe­cial ingre­di­ent to cure what ails him. Sayoko, mean­while, is revealed as a mas­ter manip­u­la­tor, appar­ent­ly over­see­ing a vio­lent role-play­ing ther­a­py ses­sion in which Albert is allowed to find his man, whomev­er they may be.

Math­ieu Amal­ric, Gré­goire Col­in and Sli­mane Dazi turn up as the vic­tims who will do or say any­thing to save their own keis­ters. Yet the more infor­ma­tion they reveal, the more we have a sense of what Minard were real­ly up to, and that’s when the film takes a turn for the des­per­ate­ly grim. Kuro­sawa is not usu­al­ly known for his overt sense of humour, but there’s cer­tain­ly a sense that he is the Mabuse-like fig­ure who is manip­u­lat­ing things from out of frame, send­ing the audi­ence on this wild goose chase while mak­ing sure the dis­com­fort quo­tient remains high, high, high.

Despite a cou­ple of shoot­ings and taser­ings, there’s very lit­tle actu­al vio­lence depict­ed on screen, yet Kuro­sawa leaves all that for the imag­i­na­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the mono­logue Albert reg­u­lar­ly repeats to his cap­tives in which he reads out ver­ba­tim the coroner’s report of his dead daugh­ter. It’s a sin­gu­lar­ly dis­mal affair, one that sits in a nec­es­sar­i­ly uncom­fort­able place between genre thriller and art­house doo­dle. But this is anoth­er intrigu­ing exer­cise in cul­ti­vat­ing a tone of extreme unease and just sus­tain­ing it until the cred­its roll.