Serpent's Path

director Kiyoshi Kurosawa somehow makes it eerie. It becomes a thriller that is full of horror, spooky, and scary. Kiyoshi continues to use the same method of filmmaking as Cure and his other films, choosing to shoot in a wide-ranging environment, focusing on location shots, and long, immersive shots that reveal the horrors of what is called “everyday life.” The deterioration of the location reflects the decay of the characters. And the vastness of the images that were shot in each scene also reflected the loneliness, the emptiness, the eerie silence, there was only discomfort and unease. Watching it made you feel uncomfortable. The film seems to open with a straightforward story of revenge, capturing the villain and extracting the truth, until abnormalities occur from the character of Miyashita and his new friend who are gradually sucked out of their humanity by the vortex of revenge and turn into evil monsters who start out no different from the murderer who killed the child in the story. It's like the flip side of the brutal vigilante movie genre. But when the movie chooses to focus on the behavior of the two main characters who are overcome by vengeance until they become cold-hearted, becoming accustomed to violence, it makes the deaths of each person in the story very hopeless and depressing, even if that person is an evil person. Kiyoshi is very good at making movies that don't explain anything to you, there is always layer of mystery on it. he choose to leave a puzzle for you to immerse yourself in, creating a feeling of discomfort and disturbing your mind, making you want to find the answer, wanting us to think and interpret what happens in the movie for ourselves. Kiyoshi also made a remake of this film into french released in 2024. But I don't think i will watch it. I enjoyed this one a lot.