Review for Eyes of the Spider / Serpent's Path

Introduction

Third Window Films’ September offering is the result of a rather outlandish experiment. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa took up the challenge to direct two feature films in the space of two weeks. The resulting films are Serpent’s Path and Eyes of the Spider, two films about gangsters, two films about revenge, and both starring Sho Aikawa. With that much in common, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s a degree of redundancy, but in actuality, the two films are really quite different in tone, and in story. Third Window Films presents the features on a single DVD disc, the first DVD release for the films outside of Japan.

Serpent’s Path

Tatsuo Miyashita is a man on a mission. His daughter was brutally murdered, and he thinks he knows who did it. He’s enlisted the aid of his friend Nijima, a science teacher to get his revenge, especially as he lacks the coolness of mind and tactical thinking to calmly carry out his plan. That plan begins when they abduct the yakuza suspect Otsuki and take him to an isolated warehouse. Because Tatsuo can’t be absolutely sure that Otsuki was the man. He needs to question him first. Then things get complicated and not least because Tatsuo is himself a former yakuza.


Serpent’s Path is a low budget, experimental film, one of two, shot on a restrictive schedule. You wouldn’t think so from watching it. I found Serpent’s Path to be a gripping, and engrossing thriller, a gangster movie where the character study is more important than violence or bombast, where the narrative is intricately layered and revealed in an utterly entrancing way, and where the idea of revenge is explored in so compelling a direction, that you begin to suspect that Park Chan-Wook might have a copy of this film on his shelf.


What makes Serpent’s Path work so well is the way that the story unfolds. It reveals more and more about the plot as the film progresses, throwing you in at the deep end at the start with no information. You just see two people in a car, Nijima and Miyashita, obviously on the way to commit some kind of criminal act. They might be thieves, they might be hitmen, you don’t really know until they get out of the car and go to work. And you don’t know exactly what their motives are until they get their victim back to the warehouse, and Miyashita confronts him with his accusations. You think that Miyashita is a novice at this, Nijima the professional, until the plot reveals that Nijima is a science teacher, and that Miyashita is a former yakuza. At each turn the movie reveals a new twist that makes you re-evaluate the story up to that point, and it keeps on doing this right up to the end credits. For all its low budget nature, I found Serpent’s Path to be more gripping and engaging than many a mega-budget Hollywood thriller.

Eyes of the Spider

Another abduction heralds this story, another grieving father searching for vengeance for a slain daughter, but in Eyes of the Spider that retribution is wrought quickly and effectively. It’s what happens afterwards to the film’s protagonist Nijima that takes centre stage. After all, merely dealing with his daughter’s killer isn’t all that fulfilling for him, and suddenly having to rejoin his everyday life, the daily commute to the office, coming home to his wife, doesn’t seem to make much sense anymore. The thing about revenge is that someone does notice, even if it isn’t the authorities, and people pay attention to people who try to obtain firearms. One day, an old schoolfriend named Iwamatu runs into Nijima, and offers him a change of pace, a job at his import export company. The company is just a front though, and the real job is as a hitman.


I had a lot easier time getting to grips with Serpent’s Path, but Eyes of the Spider is much harder to categorise. That it’s a thriller of sorts is evident, it begins by covering much the same ground as Serpent’s Path, that of a grieving father taking revenge against the man he suspects killed his daughter, and the opening induces as much discomfort as anything in Serpent’s Path. But that’s just the opening scenes; thereafter the film takes us into more absurdist and darkly comic realms, as Nijima’s talent for killing is exploited by a company who specialises in assassination.


But these are unlikely assassins, Iwamatu and his associates. Certainly they are proficient in dealing with their targets, but they do display a certain level of clumsiness and general incompetence. They also appear to deal with the darker aspects of their work by taking refuge in childishness and inanity. One of them is instructed to wear rollerblades as ‘training’ although training for what, we never find out. Then when Nijima meets the company boss, a man obsessed with amateur palaeontology, he’s forced to help him search for fossils, before being instructed to chase him. There’s a general air of silliness about the characters, but that silliness doesn’t translate into the movie, which remains dark and somewhat depressing. It’s an arc in Nijima’s life that is explored, one that is ultimately pointless and destructive, and I was never sure of what I was meant to get out of this movie.

Picture

Both movies get 1.85:1 anamorphic transfers on this dual layer disc, both in NTSC and both encoded progressively. The transfers are adequate enough, bringing across the films without any significant artefacting, but the films themselves are limited by the source material, low in budget and filmed mostly with naturalistic lighting. The image for both is grainy and soft, while the greater prevalence of darker scenes in Eyes of the Spider means that it is more prone to losing detail in those scenes.

Sound

Both films also get DD 2.0 Japanese stereo soundtracks with optional English subtitles. There are no glitches or drop-outs in the films, and the dialogue is clear throughout in both. Music is minimally used, a lot more discordant and ominous in Serpent’s Path, but offering occasional moments of whimsy in Eyes of the Spider. The subtitles are free of typographical error, and accurately timed, except for in Serpent’s Path, where at 1.10:00 into the film the subtitles shift out of sync with the dialogue for three lines.

Conclusion

Eyes of the Spider and Serpent’s Path are two very different films about the same subject. One’s a more traditionally styled thriller, while the other attempts something more esoteric and darkly comic. I really enjoyed Serpent’s Path, but I just couldn’t engage with Eyes of the Spider. The beauty of Third Window Films’ release is that you don’t have to choose between the two, you can watch both and make up your own mind. That this region free disc represents the films’ English language debut is even better.