QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM SAN SEBASTIAN

Investigative journalist Albert (Damien Bonnard) is desperate for revenge. He will do whatever it takes in order to find those responsible for the death of his eight-year-old daughter Marie, no matter how messy it gets. Finding a culprit is highly cathartic, even if the person happens to be the wrong man. Albert is so thirsty for blood that he becomes a sadistic killer himself, if a rather susceptible and clumsy one. His therapist Sayako (Ko Shibasaki), a cold and manipulative woman, are the brains behind the makeshift vigilante operation. Her real motives are rather obscure.

Marie was stabbed 16 times before her remains were found a week later. A third of her brain was missing, as well as most of her internal organs. Her body was so heavily mutilated that it was barely identifiable. Albert repeatedly plays an audio with the gruesome details of his daughter’s assassination as well as a video of the child victim playing the piano to the various men whom he kidnaps and torture, always with a helping hand of Sayako and her taser gun. She is by far the most versatile and efficient character. The clever woman can easily pass as a clueless Japanese tourist when necessary. Albert and Sayako kidnap one victim after another and shackle them to the walls of an abandoned warehouse. They use very peculiar humiliation and elicitation techniques in order to extract the truth from them. They objective is to locate the head of a child and organ trafficking organisation called The Circle. Albert believes that they brutally killed Marie because he was writing a news report on the operations,.

Coherence is entirely secondary to this bizarre revenge story. The real function and psychology of each suspected-murderer-turned-kidnap-victim is very blurry. The allegiance of each character is ambiguous and fluid. It is even questionable whether The Circle existed at all. This openness is intentional however excessive, often to the point of confusion. The nuts and bolts of the intrigue are entirely subordinate to the shock and torture tactics. Kurosawa’s deftly toys with audience perceptions in order to cause discomfort, and without resorting to extreme graphicness. We see that prisoners eat food from the floor and urinate in their trousers. We also see corpses piled up, and the occasional bang bang. Yet we never see the children being dismembered, or even the fingers of the adults being chopped off . If that’s to your taste, I strongly recommend lars Lars Von Trier’s dreadful the House That Jack Built, from 2018, or Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999) instead. Kurosawa is a lot more subtle.

Stay tuned for a completely bonkers ending, somewhat entertaining in its magnificent absurdity.

Serpent’s Path is a remake of the 1998 Japanese film of the same name, also written and directed by Kurosawa. The highly eclectic 69-year-old Japanese filmmaker joins the very selective club of directors who remade their own film in a foreign language. This is a very dubious honour, as the outcome is often pointless, or downright awful. Michael Haneke recreated 1997’s Funny Games in English 10 years later, to very disputable results. And Sebastian Lelio butchered 2013’s Gloria just five years later (with a slightly revised title: Gloria Bell), also in the language of Shakespeare. While I haven’t seen the original Serpent, I doubt that the 2024 movie could be superior to its predecessor. Setting the bar lower would be literal torture. For the time being, I shall avoid watching the 1998 film. In fact, I’d rather stick multiple needles in my eyes.

Serpent’s Path just premiered in the Official Competition of the 72nd San Sebastian International Film Festival.