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‘Serpent’s Path’ Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Turns to His Own Back Catalogue, With Coldly Compelling Results
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's third film to premiere this year, 'Serpent's Path' is an effective French-language remake of his own nasty, twisty 1998 thriller.
Wheeling in a television trolley in a manner amusingly redolent of a ’90s schoolteacher, Albert proceeds to show him grainy video footage of a young girl he says is his late eight-year-old daughter — abducted and violently murdered in a child-trafficking conspiracy rooted in Minard, the sinister corporation for which Laval works. This grisly backstory — eventually pulling two other Minard employees (Grégoire Colin and Slimane Dazi) into the tie-up-and-torture party — makes some sense of Albert’s feral hair-trigger energy, though not one of his captives seems reliable in their testimony, as the apparent shape and scope of this dastardly alleged plot remain elusively in flux. An obliquely connected subplot detailing her treatment of Yoshimura (“Drive My Car” star Hidetoshi Nishijima), a depressive immigrant suffering from extreme culture shock, provides more brain-teasing possibilities than clarifying context, while Shibasaki’s terrific, poker-faced performance is essential to keeping the guessing game going — in some scenes, her unruffled efficiency acts as a calming counter to Albert’s percolating mania, while in others, we catch a glimpse of a frozen, unyielding and perhaps irrational core.
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