This companion piece to Eyes of the Spider begins with two men, the jittery Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa) and the rigid Niijima (Sho Aikawa), kidnapping a yakuza. Miyashita is consumed with avenging the murder of his eight-year-old daughter, while Niijima merely explains, "I just wanted to try something like this." When the captive gangster blames another for the girl's death, and he, in turn, fingers another, Miyashita and Niijima start abducting them all, until suddenly the two men find themselves in way over their heads. Kurosawa fills in the edges with his trademark oddities-an amusingly idiotic abduction on a golf course; Miyashita's obsessive display of his daughter's home movies; Niijima's job as a theoretical mathematics professor-to help lighten the mood, and as in Eyes of the Spider no violence is ever shown. The true power of both films, however, comes clear in Serpent's Path's disturbing ending, where our understanding of these characters-and the nature of their actions-suddenly shifts. Understated unease creates a truly psychological horror film, not from what is shown, but from what is hauntingly implied: not the terror of the unreal, but the horror of the real.-Jason Sanders