Based on magazine reportage about a series of murders for insurance money, Shiraishi Kazuya’s The Devil’s Path (Kyoaku) nonetheless plays, quite intentionally, like fiction.
It’s not that Shiraishi, whose only previous film as director was the 2010 indie drama Lost Paradise in Tokyo, tries to make the mundane melodramatic – the strategy of many a Japanese crime drama.
Instead he attempts something more difficult: put the face of evil on the screen.
This makes for some disturbing and powerful viewing and, quite understandably, some may want to turn away.
And unlike many a commercial puzzler, in Japan or anywhere, The Devil’s Path offers no pat solutions, tied in a neat bundle by a brilliant sleuth. Not to give anything away, but evil persists, just as it does in real life, even when justice is sometimes served.
Convicted murderer Sudo Junji (Pierre Taki) writes a letter to hard-working reporter Fujii Shuichi (Yamada Takayuki) fingering a real estate agent, Kimura (Lily Franky), as the monster responsible for a staging a series of killings, all with the aim of lining his own pockets.
A beefy ex-gangster, Sudo confesses to serving the man he calls “Doc” as an enforcer and enabler, with his hands as bloody as his master’s.
Fuji finds it strange that Sudo would cop to more murders, thus sealing his date with the noose.
What’s his motive? Also, when Fuji questions those who had dealings with Kimura, he gets a picture totally different from the dark one Sudo had been painting, of a helpful, supportive sort who deserves angel’s wings, not devil’s horns.
Sudo, however, insists that “Doc” is an arch deceiver, who insinuates his way into his elderly victims’ confidence before mercilessly devouring them. But he is also vague on the sort of facts that would convince the police to reopen cases they consider closed.
Fuji realizes that he will have to dig them out himself – and becomes totally obsessed with Kimura and his crimes.
But as the weeks and months wear on his hard-nosed editor (Muraoka Nozomi) loses patience with what she sees as a non-story, while his wife (Ikewaki Chizuru), exhausted from caring for Fuji’s dementia-afflicted mother, reaches the end of her mental and physical rope. Meanwhile, the smirking, slithery Kimura is still free, seemingly beyond the reach of the law and his former partner’s retribution.
Released in September of last year, The Devil’s Path won many domestic awards, including selection as the year’s third best Japanese film by the Kinema Junpo magazine critics’ poll, considered Japan’s most prestigious. Most honored among the cast was illustrator-turned-actor Lily Franky, who picked up an armful of Best Supporting Actor prizes.
Usually cast as sympathetic types, Franky plays Kimura as a shape-shifting man/demon, switching with a scary fluidity from smooth-operator civil to rage-ball evil. But it’s his eyes, mocking and undefeated, that make the film’s last and strongest impression, chilling to the bone.
In this case, the devil truly got his due.
Mark Schilling