‘Serpent’s Path’ Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Turns to His Own Back Catalogue, With Coldly Compelling Results

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic “The first version is the work of a talented amateur,” said Alfred Hitchcock to François Truffaut of his 1934 thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” remade by Hitch himself in 1956. “The second was made by a professional.” Few are the filmmakers who gather sufficient career mileage and goodwill to take a second pass at their own work; fewer are those who make something worthwhile in the process. (A moment of silence, please, for George Sluizer’s botched English-language redo of “The Vanishing.”) But Kiyoshi Kurosawa, not unlike Hitchcock, is the kind of tireless genre craftsman who seems to approach every feature as a test of his own proficiency: “Serpent’s Path,” a brisk, harsh and, yes, clinically professional update of his own 1998 thriller of the same title, passes said test without a moment’s strain.

There’s no urgent reason to remake “Serpent’s Path” except, one presumes, the primarily self-serving pleasures of doing so. The original, a cold-blooded little revenge tale that twists itself into ever more perverse psychological contortions, was never a major work, and Kurosawa’s new version (co-written by him, unlike its precedessor, which he only directed) doesn’t seek to significantly expand it.

Switching the gender of one key character, however, does much to invigorate a narrative heavily carried over from the original, as does relocating the action from Japan to France — making for a Gallic dalliance more suited to Kurosawa’s sensibility than his first French-language effort, the wan 2016 ghost story “Daguerrotype.” Having already been released in Japan months ahead of its international premiere in competition at San Sebastian, “Serpent’s Path” should snake its way quietly through global.