Some filmmakers build reputations around a handful of canonized titles. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has the rarer kind of filmography—the one that keeps opening up in new directions the deeper you go. This month, Janus Films and the IFC Center are bringing two key pieces of that body of work back into circulation together, with “Serpent’s Path” and “Chime” opening in New York on March 27 as a single theatrical program. For both films, it marks a first U.S. theatrical run: the 1998 original “Serpent’s Path” arrives in a 4K restoration, while “Chime” gets its U.S. premiere and will play only in theaters.
“Serpent’s Path,” made straight after “Cure,” takes a stripped-down revenge premise and pushes it toward something colder and more existential. The story follows Miyashita, a yakuza subordinate obsessed with avenging his daughter’s murder, who teams with a detached math teacher named Nijima to kidnap and torture the man they believe is responsible. From there, the search keeps widening, the logic of revenge keeps hardening, and the film descends into the kind of moral void Kurosawa has always understood better than almost anyone. Janus lists the film at 85 minutes and notes that Kurosawa later remade it in 2024.
“Chime,” by contrast, is much shorter and no less destabilizing. The 2024 film centers on a culinary instructor, Matsuoka, who witnesses a student’s suicide after the young man insists a chiming sound is controlling his mind. Soon, Matsuoka begins hearing it too, and Kurosawa turns that premise into a compact nightmare about madness, perception, and violent rupture. Janus and IFC both describe it as a work of escalating dread, and IFC states plainly that it will never be released on streaming platforms.
What makes the pairing so strong is the contrast. One film is an 85-minute late-’90s revenge thriller built from long takes, procedural cruelty, and the deadening logic of violence. The other is a 45-minute modern horror piece that seems to corrode reality from the inside out. But both are recognizably Kurosawa—precise about space, unnerving in rhythm, and fascinated by the point where ordinary life gives way to something spiritually poisoned. IFC is screening them together as a 130-minute program, which feels like exactly the right way to encounter them: not as separate curios, but as two connected demonstrations of how flexible and merciless his cinema can be.
“Serpent’s Path” and “Chime” open at the IFC Center in New York on March 27, 2026. Watch the trailer below.
