Serpent's Path

Serpent's Path (1998)

蛇の道

Violence escalates as a man seeks revenge for the murder of his daughter.

With the help of a mysterious acquaintance, a former low-level yakuza tracks down and kidnaps the man he believes kidnapped and murdered his daughter, but others are soon implicated in the death.

Date of release
1998-02-21
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (25)
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Crime, Thriller
Director
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Collection
修羅の極道

Casting

Interesting facts

Serpent's Path is a 1998 Japanese crime thriller film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and written by Hiroshi Takahashi. It follows the story of two men who engage in kidnapping and torture in order to discover the identity of a child murderer. The film stars Show Aikawa as Nijima, a calm professional, and Teruyuki Kagawa as Miyashita, a grieving ex-yakuza. Positioned by Kurosawa as a continuation of his V-Cinema productions, the production company Daiei ensured that it had a theatrical release. The film has since become a cult classic. A 2024 remake written and directed by Kurosawa uses the same premise but is set in France.

Production

Around the time of the film's creation, Kurosawa was in the middle of an extremely productive period. Between 1996 and 1998 he produced eleven different films, two of them (Cure and License to Live) released theatrically. He received an offer to make two films in two weeks on a very low budget; the second of these was Eyes of the Spider, a more light-hearted take on the genre. Both feature Show Aikawa as a character named Nijima.

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