Chime
The Serpent’s Path/La Voie du serpent
Cloud/クラウド/Kuraudo

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi

The average cinephile would certainly be forgiven for not noticing Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s relatively long absence from filmmaking to open this tumultuous decade. After his perpetually underrated Wife of a Spy played in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, he didn’t put out another film for four years, his longest break since 2008 (Tokyo Sonata) to 2012 (Penance). In the haze of the pandemic and its attendant complications, it’s only natural that even a steady artist like Kurosawa would fall out of view. Still, the slow roll-out of announcements—beginning in April 2023 and concluding in February 2024—that he would be releasing three feature films in the calendar year was one of the more delightful phenomenons of the past few years.

The groundswell seemed to stem from a variety of impulses: the excitement at his return of course, the surprise at this heightened degree of prolificness (Hong Sang-soo was inevitably invoked). However, there was perhaps just a little bit of relief. Following a run of, in the eyes of the many who still view Kurosawa as “merely” one of horror cinema’s greatest exponents, unconventional films—Before We Vanish‘s alien invasion, To the Ends of the Earth‘s odd travelogue, Wife of a Spy‘s period intrigue—the announcements of first a remake of Serpent’s Path (1998), one of his final V-cinema efforts, then the explicitly supernatural Chime, and finally the suspense thriller Cloud seemed to herald something of a return to form.

Ironically, the timeline of the films’ respective availability has been jumbled and uneven at every turn. The 45-minute Chime premiered in a sidebar at the Berlinale and, thanks to its botched release from a NFT company, became available via extralegal means a few months later. Though The Serpent’s Path technically premiered second, receiving a full-fledged theatrical release in Japan in June, it was completely unseen in the West until its competition berth at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and has only received a scant few festival showings in North America since then. Therefore, Cloud, the final film announced and premiered from this trio, has received much greater attention at an earlier time than its predecessor, thanks to a Venice out-of-competition slot (where it was commonly cited as being better than a number of the actual Golden Lion hopefuls) and a well-attended TIFF premiere. And, as has been frequently mentioned, none of these films currently have U.S. distribution.

I say all of this not only to catalogue the strange journey that related films, especially Kurosawa’s—lest we forget that Journey to the Shore, an Un Certain Regard prizewinner and NYFF Main Slate entry, never got an American distributor—can take in the currents of the festival circuit, but to point at what might be called a certain interchangeability between these three works, all of which are strong and distinct in their own ways yet ever-so-slightly lesser than the majority of his more recent work. I watched these earlier this month—in an appropriately mixed-up order: The Serpent’s Path, Cloud, Chime; I’ll be discussing the films according to the order they premiered—and throughout I couldn’t help but think of how my friend Evan Morgan, one of the smartest critics I know (especially on Kurosawa), remarked to me that, after seeing Chime and knowing about the two films to follow, he felt Kurosawa was entering a more retrospective period after more than a decade where “everything seemed new and open to infinite possibilities,” an assessment which is, for better or worse, largely accurate, or at least indicative of a somewhat more straightforward conception than his previous predilection.

Chime, despite its short running time and novel setting, is ultimately the film that adheres most closely to this paradigm; it is also the strongest of the year. Kurosawa is by no means new to working within the span of an hour, but these works—including “Beautiful New Bay Area Project” and Seventh Code, both from 2013, and his short “Actually…” from two years ago—have typically, due to a combination of their status as commissions and their more free-floating narratives, allowed Kurosawa to play in freewheeling fashion with genre and tone. Chime, by contrast, is almost perversely committed to its evocation of the dread that has been his most widely beloved mode for so long, which is to say that this is paradoxically a continually surprising film narratively without the unexpected shifts of many of his other, even better works.

True, Chime generates an immediate frisson from its main character’s work: the antiseptic teaching kitchens, besides uncannily reminding me instantly of Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, are much more orderly yet oddly reminiscent of his typically dingy environs, with all the cold reflective metal and knives a sure harbinger of the violence to come. The familiar elements don’t only appear at work; viewing this in close proximity to Tokyo Sonata, the family dinners here bear a marked resemblance, only streamlined and stripped of all but the most essential elements. When the premise first came out, many compared it to Memoria, but besides there being surprisingly little of the actual chime (much more akin to wind chimes as opposed to, say, the sound of a ringtone), it is more than anything else an externalization, a reminder of all the potential evil surrounding us.

Especially at this early juncture, it’s too reductive to say that Chime is the most successful of Kurosawa’s films this year merely because it sticks closest to his strengths, which lie both in sustained mood and in the various means by which he teases out his characters’ madness: the overflowing box of cans that the chef’s wife is dumping out at one point, the nighttime sojourn to hide a body, a disastrous job interview caused by the chef’s manic inability to get out of his own perspective. It’s probably unlikely that this scenario could sustain a film much longer than this one, especially considering the coda: a sudden burst of (emulated?) film grain that calls to mind Kurosawa’s recreation of 9.5mm film for Wife of a Spy, the exact right frenzied note to end a uniformly thrilling 45 minutes. Chime is direct about its intentions and executes them in the right manner, which for a craftsman of this caliber is kind of ideal.

In a certain sense, it’s convenient for referential purposese that the remake of Kurosawa’s 1998 film appears to be formally titled in English The Serpent’s Path, though I wonder how much of that comes from the direct translation of the French “La Voie” (not “le chemin” as originally reported). Such a small yet focusing element describes this take on his original material well. For me, if it is not quite the best of this trio, then it’s certainly the most fascinating. In broad strokes, The Serpent’s Path operates as a tremendously faithful remake of Serpent’s Path, following a grieving father as he, with the help of a much more implacable accomplice, kidnaps and tortures men who he believes killed—unlike in the Japanese original, molestation is never mentioned—his daughter.

Of course, the film takes place in Paris, featuring the great French actor Damien Bonnard as the father, and represents Kurosawa’s second film outside his native country after the French film Daguerrotype. His helper, replacing the bespectacled male math teacher of the original, is a female doctor played by Shibasaki Ko, who speaks impeccable French and in certain ways represents a combination of characters from Serpent’s Path, including an enigmatic gang leader who served as one of the main antagonists. The original has long been noted for its overwhelming bleakness, a pitiless examination of abasement that equally makes sense amid his direct-to-video work and coming right after Cure. The Serpent’s Path, at least in my view, does reach a similar height and, in terms of Kurosawa’s expression of his interests, surpass the original, but it doesn’t necessarily aim to do so via its atmosphere.

The dingy, enormous warehouse is replaced by more discrete, still dilapidated rooms reminiscent of a soundstage; the 80 minute film is expanded out to almost 2 hours without seeming to add too much in the way of plot. Rather, The Serpent’s Path works more slyly than the other two films put together when viewed from the lens of adaptation. Most obviously notable are the scenes with Nishijima Hideotoshi (the lead of Kurosawa’s Creepy, which featured Serpent’s Path star Kagawa Teruyuki) as one of the doctor’s patients, who has lived in France for many years without ever learning the language: his signature weariness mixed with charisma as he talks about his persistent migraines and growing dissatisfaction with his life communicates a great deal about a dislocation faced, in one way or another, by all the characters.

Kurosawa’s ability to evoke modern alienation has always been one of his most significant tools, and it’s further bolstered here by one of the most striking changes. While many sequences are replicated virtually identically, down to a few perfectly copied visual choices like a tilt-up as the first captive looks up at the father, the film invokes the idea of a corporate conspiracy which led to the murder much earlier than the hints given in Serpent’s Path. Both films are, at their core, about a paranoiac struggling to establish a motivation for the havoc he is wreaking, but The Serpent’s Path introduction of a more coherent throughline trades Serpent’s Path‘s haze of confusion—signified by the copious use of complex math problems—for the brutal, cold light of digital and two-faced interactions enabled by late capitalism and ostensible good intentions. Ultimately, my preference for The Serpent’s Path may simply lie in the sheer novelty of seeing Kurosawa directing Damien Bonnard as he torments Mathieu Amalric and Grégoire Colin, but the fullness with which he delves into his newly revitalized premise, even if it lacks the focus of Chime, is truly chilling.

It might be something of an anticlimax to end with Cloud, even though it’s a very worthy film in its own right and already, deservedly, has plenty of champions. Like Chime, it’s a film that, despite the noted shift from suspense thriller to quasi-action shootout, is relatively direct about its intentions and interests, and “merely” sets about executing them with great vigor. Much of the coverage around the film has revolved around its apparent updating of Cure and especially Pulse for a more depersonalized, bland Internet age; it might be too harsh to say that these comparisons are more reflective of Kurosawa’s still underseen body of work and therefore Western critics’ limited understanding of his cinema, but, a few potent scenes of our antihero as he waits for his scalped goods to sell out on a flickering reseller website aside, this is much less a film about the actual apparatus of technology than human interactions under duress.

Eric Marsh compared it to Doppelganger, which I haven’t seen, but, perhaps because of the compressed preparatory viewing I undertook for my own week of Kurosawa, it oddly reminded me most of Serpent’s Path‘s sister film Eyes of the Spider (also 1998); for his part Filipe Furtado cited The Revenge films (I’ve seen the first and can see the resemblance), which also belong to Kurosawa’s V-Cinema works. Though Eyes virtually begins where Serpent’s Path leaves off—starring Aikawa Sho, the helper in that film, as a man seeking revenge for his daughter’s murder—it quickly becomes something of a yakuza comedy, tracking the drudgery of a hitman’s life in a vague, nonsensical hierarchy; though there is plenty of bloodshed, it is dealt with in a fairly lightweight manner.

Cloud only involves the yakuza tangentially, in terms of the implied connections and past that the reseller’s assistant possesses, but it feels of a piece with Eyes of the Spider in its approach to violence and the numbing consequences of economic manipulation, especially once the reseller and his girlfriend move to the countryside and all the problems they hoped to escape are multiplied tenfold. Kurosawa’s staging of the action scenes, which reminded me of the wonderfully absurd shootouts in the very different Before We Vanish, is very clean and dynamic, playing up the cavernous desolation of the warehouse (as opposed to the disturbingly tidy warehouse in The Serpent’s Path). Ultimately, the inexorable grind of moneymaking keeps moving, encapsulated in the use of one of Kurosawa’s best recurring formal devices during the final moments: obvious rear projection during driving scenes, which he once described as aiding the sense of transformation caused by the resulting conversations. Like its two similarly brilliant brethren, it’s clear that something akin to an apocalypse is fast approaching; while most of my favorite Kurosawas don’t end on such an unambiguous note of pessimism, there’s still not much as compelling as his cinema, whatever running time, genre, or form it adopts.