The Grand Illusion

Two masterworks from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, released theatrically for the first time in the US!

A masterclass in escalating dread and shocking violence, CHIME reaffirms Kiyoshi Kurosawa as one of modern horror’s most innovative and unpredictable visionaries. During a class, culinary instructor Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka) witnesses the suicide of a young student (Seiichi Kohinata), driven to insanity by what he claims is a chiming sound that controls his mind. Soon, Matsuoka begins hearing it, too, and descends into a mental abyss that warps his perception of reality and gives vent to his darkest impulses. Expertly blending psychological portraiture and hallucinatory mystery, Kurosawa offers a chilling depiction of madness that interrogates the very stability of our everyday existence, with the director’s patented creeping tracking shots and complex sound design fashioning an immersively terrifying and unnerving cinematic experience. CHIME will only be available in theaters and will never be released on streaming platforms.

SERPENT’S PATH (1998) is a dark gangland thriller with philosophical overtones. 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. Featuring Kurosawa’s patented long takes and his claustrophobic arrangement of space, SERPENT’S PATH is one of the legendary director’s most chilling investigations into the endless cycle of violence and the evil that lodges in every heart. Kurosawa would go on to remake the story in 2024, but the original, now newly restored, remains as shocking and timeless as ever.

In Japanese with English subtitles.

“Chime is great not because it refuses interpretation or analysis, but because it welcomes it, secure in the knowledge—at once apt and hopelessly bleak—that coherence is of little consolation in a contingent universe.” Adam Nayman, Film Comment

“Serpent’s Path is as challenging and rewarding, not to mention gripping, as anything [Kurosawa] has made.” Tom Mes, Midnight Eye