“The first version is the work of a talented amateur,” said Alfred Hitchcock to François Truffaut of his 1934 thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” remade by Hitch himself in 1956. “The second was made by a professional.” Few are the filmmakers who gather sufficient career mileage and goodwill to take a second pass at their own work; fewer are those who make something worthwhile in the process. (A moment of silence, please, for George Sluizer’s botched English-language redo of “The Vanishing.”) But Kiyoshi Kurosawa, not unlike Hitchcock, is the kind of tireless genre craftsman who seems to approach every feature as a test of his own proficiency: “Serpent’s Path,” a brisk, harsh and, yes, clinically professional update of his own 1998 thriller of the same title, passes said test without a moment’s strain.

There’s no urgent reason to remake “Serpent’s Path” except, one presumes, the primarily self-serving pleasures of doing so. The original, a cold-blooded little revenge tale that twists itself into ever more perverse psychological contortions, was never a major work, and Kurosawa’s new version (co-written by him, unlike its precedessor, which he only directed) doesn’t seek to significantly expand it. Switching the gender of one key character, however, does much to invigorate a narrative heavily carried over from the original, as does relocating the action from Japan to France — making for a Gallic dalliance more suited to Kurosawa’s sensibility than his first French-language effort, the wan 2016 ghost story “Daguerrotype.” Having already been released in Japan months ahead of its international premiere in competition at San Sebastian, “Serpent’s Path” should snake its way quietly through global arthouses.

It begins with a kidnapping, the brief run-up to which establishes the contrast in sensibilities between its two principal characters: jittery, wound-up Frenchman Albert (Damien Bonnard) and unnervingly composed Japanese psychiatrist Sayoko (Kô Shibasaki), a female rewrite of the role played by Sho Aikawa in the earlier film. Despite his cold feet when they meet outside an anonymous Parisian office building, her sangfroid prevails as they enter, closing in on drab-suited accountant Laval (Mathieu Amalric), before tazing the man, zipping him into a body bag and tossing him in the trunk of their car. This brisk, bloodless opening salvo sets the tone for a film that will proceed very much on an “action first, explanation later” basis.

Once Laval comes to, firmly chained to the wall in a grimy out-of-town warehouse, some details begin to emerge. Wheeling in a television trolley in a manner amusingly redolent of a ’90s schoolteacher, Albert proceeds to show him grainy video footage of a young girl he says is his late eight-year-old daughter — abducted and violently murdered in a child-trafficking conspiracy rooted in Minard, the sinister corporation for which Laval works. This grisly backstory — eventually pulling two other Minard employees (Grégoire Colin and Slimane Dazi) into the tie-up-and-torture party — makes some sense of Albert’s feral hair-trigger energy, though not one of his captives seems reliable in their testimony, as the apparent shape and scope of this dastardly alleged plot remain elusively in flux.

Hardest of all to read, however, are Sayoko’s motives in Albert’s revenge mission, as the nature of their relationship, too, gets blurrier the more closely we examine it. Not that we ever get all that close: DP Alexis Kavyrchine frames much of the action in taunting, even alienating wide shot, making such rare treasure of close-ups that we risk reading more into them than we should.

Has Sayoko masterminded this project as a kind of extreme therapy session for an emotionally frail patient? An obliquely connected subplot detailing her treatment of Yoshimura (“Drive My Car” star Hidetoshi Nishijima), a depressive immigrant suffering from extreme culture shock, provides more brain-teasing possibilities than clarifying context, while Shibasaki’s terrific, poker-faced performance is essential to keeping the guessing game going — in some scenes, her unruffled efficiency acts as a calming counter to Albert’s percolating mania, while in others, we catch a glimpse of a frozen, unyielding and perhaps irrational core.

Yet for all the agile, unpredictable narrative maneuvrings of Kurosawa and Aurelien Ferenczi’s script, the chief rewards of “Serpent’s Path” lie less in its grand design than in its eccentric, coolly witty details: the steady but unexcitable pace of its rising body count, the increasingly absurd repetition of Albert’s video show-and-tell act, and repeated scenes in which Kurosawa and Kavyrchine’s camera patiently observes the rotating circuit of a living-room Roomba, granting the machine a banal yet inexorably escalating air of menace. These are the incidentals a filmmaker can afford to prioritize in a story they’ve already told once before: “Serpent’s Path” may never feel like more than an exercise for its well-practised helmer, but it’s an offhand, enjoyable flex.