A 4K restoration of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1998 crime thriller Serpent’s Path is heading to theaters this spring, but it’s the rare horror title being paired with this feature that has us excited.
Opening March 27, 2026, at the IFC Center, Serpent’s Path will begin showing with Chime, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 45-minute exercise in existential horror.
In Chime, a culinary teacher becomes consumed with a sense of dread when strange things begin happening to his students.
It’s been described as one of the filmmaker’s scariest yet, but the 2024 short film has flown largely under the radar due to its strange release. To date, it’s only been available to rent or purchase via NFT-power on Japanese digital video trading platform Roadstead.io. There, a certain number of copies of a movie are made available to purchase, and then the purchasers can rent them out if they choose.
It’s a lot of steps to simply watch a movie described as one of last year’s most terrifying, and luckily, now we won’t have to.
The Japanese horror master, who previously helmed Cure and Pulse, recently directed the subversive thriller Cloud that released earlier this year.
As for Serpent’s Path, “Obsessed with avenging his young daughter’s murder, yakuza subordinate Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa) recruits Nijima (Sho Aikawa), a brilliant yet strangely detached math teacher, to help carry out a scheme to kidnap and torture the man allegedly responsible. But the plan goes awry when their target, Otsuki (Yurei Yanagi), fingers another mobster as the mastermind behind Miyashita’s tragedy. As the two partners ascend the yakuza chain of command in search of the true culprit, Miyashita and Nijima follow the cold, calculating logic of revenge, descending into a moral abyss from which they may never surface.”
Keep an eye out for Chime’s stateside theatrical release this spring and stay tuned for more on the film that Film Comment has stated “could be a spiritual sequel” to Cure.
