“Emptiness isn’t misery. It’s the beginning of something new.” Released the same year as its companion piece, Serpent’s Path (1998), Eyes of the Spider finds Kiyoshi Kurosawa once again exploring the disturbing consequences of revenge, this time in the cutthroat Japanese underworld. After tracking down and murdering his daughter’s killer, white-collar paper pusher Nijima (Show Aikawa, also the star of Serpent’s Path) is recruited for a new job by Iwamatsu, an old high-school friend who now heads a ragtag crew with ties to the yakuza. Nijima is perfect for executing the gang’s bloody assignments: already an emotional shell, he immediately takes to the role of stone-cold hitman, even as his loyalties are tested by a yakuza middleman and his boss, an amateur paleontologist. Filled with a palpable sense of dread (courtesy of the director’s signature anxiety-inducing long takes) as well as absurdist comic touches, Eyes of the Spider is one of Kurosawa’s most ambitious and indefinable works, a self-satirizing genre study investigating the moral void of a traumatized man—and how he may very well mirror ourselves.