Serpent's Path & Eyes of the Spider (Japan, 1998)

Who knew that in 1998, we got a Japanese precursor to Park Chan-wook's Vengeance-trilogy, only this time it's a duo. 

Both directed in the same year by everyone's (you horror connoisseur's out there) favorite Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and both dealing with the ever returning, never-dying theme of revenge. I mentioned Chan-wook because Serpent's Path especially feels like a huge inspiration for his Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), only here we got a much higher body count. Serpent and Spider very much goes hand in hand, sharing some of the same actors and how they deal with the possibility of being able to exact pain on those who've ruined your life, and in some instances it gets way darker than Chan-wook's films. 

The two stories are also like different branches on the same tree, where in Spider a man discovers a darker side of himself after exacting revenge on his daughter's killer, and in Serpent a man enlists a friend to help him identify and exact revenge upon his daughter's murderer. Kurosawa manages to juggle the films plot elements not to close to each other and finds their own personalities with ease, the only thing the viewer know is that someone is going to pay for a heinous crime.

Genre: Drama/Crime

Retribution (Japan, 2006)

Yoshioka, an experienced detective, investigates the murder of an unknown woman in a red dress. She was drowned on the Tokyo waterfront, but an autopsy reveals that her stomach is full of seawater. Moreover, all the clues he finds relate to himself: A button found at the murder scene matches one that is missing from his own coat, and fingerprints found match his own. Yoshioka realizes that the only viable suspect is himself; but he doesn’t remember a thing.

Retribution (Sakebi) is a murder mystery that drifts further and further into a ghost story. Actor Kōji Yakusho (13 Assassins, Cure) is perfect for the role as a man who's psyche comes crashing down on him, and the special effects are superb when they do appear. The director truly nailed the feeling of walls closing in on our protagonist, and the sudden bursts of supernatural elements must be one of the best implementations of horror I've ever seen. Masterful suspense.

Genre: Horror/Mystery/Thriller