1997 was a busy year for Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Serpent’s Path and Eyes Of The Spider (1998) were two movies united by the same theme – revenge – and the same star – Sho Aikawa. They were low budget movies for the straight-to-video market and each apparently only had a two week shoot. In between, Kurosawa also made his breakout international horror movie, Cure, released in 1998. Serpent’s Path and Eyes Of The Spider came out after Cure.
If Serpent’s Path is a circle of doom, everything eventually leading back around to you, Eyes Of The Spider is less about the curve of a shape. It’s about what’s in a circle: a void. With his daughter murdered, Aikawa carries out his revenge in the first ten minutes against a man he’s captured and bound. With oblique cuts to the daughter’s body discovered and Aikawa’s own violence against the culprit, there’s no catharsis intended. Aikawa returns home to his wife and continues his office job. A friend from school appears with another job offer, which turns out to be joining his Yakuza gang. With each development, Aikawa remains a still presence, often replying “huh” to each question and assignment presented to him. As he drifts through his new job, the other gang members dispel their own boredom with hobbies, practising rollerskating or going fishing. Even the senior members up the yakuza ladder dig for rocks. Whatever can distract from the prevailing emptiness.
Eyes of the Spider is more unusual and offbeat than Serpent’s Path, and there’s a slight connection to Takashi Kitano’s Sontaine; the idea of boyish games and innocent distractions from a world of gangster violence. In contrast to Sonatine, everything here is muted and there’s considerable effect in Kiyoshi’s use of proximity to the camera. The changes from wide distant shots where characters are like specks in a landscape, to when they closer to the camera and to us. There’s both humour and uneasiness here, and even if it feels like a draft in comparison to something fully realised like Cure, I liked that Eyes Of The Spider was short and strange. It feels less about gangsters or violence, and more about an existential dissatisfaction with work culture, prefiguring Tokyo Sonata. Aikawa is great at being a stoic presence floating through the void.
Available on YouTube with subtitles. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 