Eyes of the Spider

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Eyes of the Spider, shot for the home video market in tandem with the writer-director's first take on Serpent's Path, is similarly concerned with themes of bereavement and how misshapen and ungainly revenge can become. Sho Aikawa's Nijima is a middle-aged father mourning, and attempting to move on from, the brutal murder of his daughter. Obviously, the event is indelible: we are shown flashbacks in which Nijima sleepwalks into the crowd of onlookers who have gathered on wasteland around her body. He pushes through these gawkers and, before a pair of listless police officers can react to his crime scene disturbance, Nijima has scooped up his lifeless child in a desperate attempt to return her home. Years pass and, completely understandably, this moment never leaves Nijima's thoughts. In an attempt to expel this pain, Najima kidnaps the man who he believes murdered his baby. Taped to a chair in a derelict building, the accused suffers beatings with promises of worse to come. 

Before Nijima can really begin to turn the screws though, this person - who consistently pleads his innocence and never agrees to any of the accusations levelled at him - dies, seemingly because his captor never thought to provide any food or water to prolong the torment. Nijima's reaction to this development is a disconnected kind of disappointment rather than full-blooded catharsis. However he imagined this scenario playing out in his head has now been lost to circumstance. Nijima returns to his wife and a deskbound nine-to-five job, but struggles to engage with either. Before long he runs into a childhood friend who offers him nondescript work that, at least initially, demands Nijima stamp stacks and stacks of paper to no clear purpose. Eventually it becomes clear that this is a criminal gang who specialise in corporate, honeypot assassinations and, before long, they themselves are at odds with the scheming, suited figures who constitute their head office. Eyes of the Spider, at least in this discursive middle-section, displays a similar sort of stoic absurdity as a Takeshi Kitano crime film, with Aikawa filling in for Beat as the unfeeling agent of violence and gallows humour. 

As the film moves into its final stages though, with Nijima ordered to liquidate his allies, Eyes of the Spider reveals a truly vivid ability to transmit revulsion, specifically in terms of how its doomed central character behaves. Having failed to exorcise the horror he himself experienced by losing his child, Nijima, eventually, finds himself almost re-enacting the incident, only this time from the perspective of the murderer. You see, central to the corporate compromise that Nijima's gang specialises in is Moe Sakura's Miki, the woman who lures unsuspecting marks to their demise. When Nijima begins killing his former allies, Miki elopes with Dankan's Iwamatu, the school friend who talked Aikawa's salaryman into this line of work in the first place. Having killed her lover, Nijima chases a distressed Miki through a forest, pelting the wheezing, shrieking woman with rocks. Cinematographer Masaki Tamura alternates between a dispassionate glide that tracks alongside the sprinting pair and a hand-held camera that rocks back-and-forth in close pursuit. Untethered, the film's perspective aligns with the revolting energies bubbling away in a fortysomething man who is indulging himself in the most sickening sort of power imbalance. Aikawa plays the scenes final, crushing moments as if struck by acute but nauseating insight: a childish, taunting game has suddenly aligned with horrifying, permanent reality.