Reprising the theme of an out-of-control father seeking revenge on his daughter’s murderer, prolific director Kiyoshi Kurosawa looks back to the beginnings of his versatile career in genre with this remake of his 1998 horror film The Serpent’s Path. Though elegant in its shooting, sets and acting, the story of an evil foundation that abducts children to harvest their organs is hard to take seriously. In addition, the narration feels unnecessarily slow and repetitive toward the end, which could limit its audience appeal; ditto the dismal and unconvincing portrayal evil moms offered by two late-coming characters in the service of a denouement. It will be playing the festival circuit this fall, beginning with a competition slot in San Sebastian, and Kurosawa fans can judge for themselves.
This is the second time Kurosawa has shot a film in French, after his romantic horror Daguerrotype starring Tahar Rahim in 2016. Here, instead of the original all-Japanese cast and setting, he opts for a natural, modern blend of nationalities which allows him to cast iconic actors like Mathieu Amalric, Damien Bonnard and Grégoire Colin, not to mention a very fine supporting role by Drive My Car lead Hidetoshi Nishijima.
This update brings nothing particularly new to the table of the writer-director’s work. Short as it is on visual explicitness, it seems sedate and unimaginative compared to the high bar set by contemporary shockers like Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winner Parasite or Lathimos’s Venice Gold Lion Poor Things, not to mention the excesses of Takeshi Miike and Kim Ki-duk. Hard core horror buffs are likely to take a break, while the director’s fan club will find other things to admire.
Far from the dark, hypnotic storytelling of his early mystery-horror films like Cure or Pulse, this is a muted, rather cerebral revenge thriller in which child killings, amputations and live organ removal are invoked verbally but never — horrors! — visually portrayed on screen. Which is not in itself a bad thing, as it leads the two vigilantes who take justice into their own hands down the path to drama, with a whiff of Dog Day Afternoon’s pathos and missteps.
The action opens in the middle of an improbable kidnapping attempt on a well-heeled street of a French city. Damien Bonnard, who starred as the provincial cop in Ladj Ly’s tough Les Misérables, plays the lost, half-crazed Albert, a freelance journalist and the bereaved father of an 8-year-old girl who was brutally stabbed and eviscerated in the woods outside her home. He is given every reason possible to make a revenge killing morally plausible – yet ethics remains on the fringes of the tale.
On the morning when he is hesitating about kidnapping the accountant Laval, who he suspects killed little Marie, his wavering resolve is shored up by a haughty psychotherapist named Sayoko (played with emotionless snake-eyed ice by Ko Shibasaki, a star of the Netflix detective series Invisible.) Why this medical professional wants to help him commit murder is only spelled out in the final scenes, but by then the audience will have long guessed. It should be noted that her professionality is skillfully called into question in several scenes with a worried patient (Hidetoshi Nishijima, fascinating to watch), whose physicals symptoms she airily dismisses with a prescription of industrial-strength anxiety pills.
Surprisingly, Sayoko and Albert succeed in immobilizing the surprised accountant, individualized by actor Mathieu Amalric with a gentle but effective comic edge before he is wrestled into Albert’s trunk. They drive to a vast, remote, deserted industrial construction in which the French countryside seems to be inundated, if this film is any judge, and where Laval is promptly shackled to the wall. There he is subject to the questioning and psychological torture of his two amateur captors, as Nicolas Errèra’s urgent score ups the ante on how long he’ll survive.
It is a pattern that will be repeated, at leisurely length, two more times while Albert and Sayoko continue to look for Marie’s killer and the truth begins to surface. For instance, Albert was conducting a journalistic investigation of the foundation, where he got to know its charismatic chairman, Pierre Guèrin (Grégoire Colin). One suspect leads to another; the last is a security guard (a muscular, no-nonsense Slimane Dazi from A Prophet and Only Lovers Left Alive) who helps them close in on the true culprits.
The setting may be French, but it vaunts the same minimalism and post-industrial backgrounds of abandoned factories and toxic warehouses seen in Kurosawa’s Japanese work, which herald his environmental concerns. Among the film’s pleasures is the sure-footed cinematography of D.P. Alexis Kavyrchine, who varies the lighting and camera angles within the visually bare spaces of empty buildings and a handful of sets, to keep the film from resembling photographed theater.
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hiroshi Takahashi
Cast: Ko Shibasaki, Damien Bonnard, Mathieu Amalric
Cinematography: Alexis Kavyrchine
Editing: Thomas Marchand
Music: Nicolas Errèra
Sound: Thomas Gauder, Paul Heymans, Francois Boudet
Production companies: Cinefrance Studios (France), Tarantula (Belgium), Tarantula (Luxembourg), Kadokawa Corp. (Japan)
World Sales: Kadokawa Corp.
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In French, Japanese
113 minutes
