2026 / Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: Cure; Pulse; witnessing your neighbor through a telescope every night as they watch Rashomon over and over again while their studio apartment gets messier and messier each day, the trash piles up all around them, and disaster seems imminent, but they manage to keep going for one more viewing.
Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa earned international acclaim for his unsettling psychological horror film Cure, which replaces traditional scares with an oppressive sterility that grows increasingly unbearable as the film progresses. His films merge traditional genre elements with post-modern intellectual puzzles that can be as confounding as they are intoxicating. I find many of his films to be quite difficult, but also find myself always curiously coming back for more: in this case, his first-ever samurai movie.
Based on the novel of the same name by Honobu Yonezawa, The Samurai and the Prisoner is set in the late 16th century and draws on real events and historical figures. Brutal warlord Oda Nobunaga—who seemed to pop up in dozens of PlayStation 2 games in the 2000s—is trying to unify the country by bending every feudal lord to his rule. Lord Murashige (Masahiro Motoki, Departures), a former Nobunaga disciple, has turned against him and prepares Arioka Castle for a long siege, hoping to hold out and convince other feudal lords to join him in resistance.
Though set during a war, don’t expect much in the way of action. The Samurai and the Prisoner takes place primarily within the castle walls, where life continues over the course of a year, with each part of the film set in a different season. But in each season, something mysterious happens, causing Murashige to go full-on samurai detective, albeit rendered in the stiff, detached style Kurosawa is known for.
In the first section, set in winter, there’s a “locked room” mystery (think Wake Up Dead Man) where a young boy has been killed with an “invisible arrow” shot through a set of doors cracked only three inches and with no arrow to be found. Murashige gathers clues, interviews suspects and witnesses, and then descends to the castle’s dungeon to meet with the titular prisoner, Kanbei (Masaki Suda, the lead in Kurosawa’s previous film Cloud). Kanbei was an envoy sent by Nobunaga to give Murashige a final chance to surrender. While expecting to either be released or killed, according to samurai custom, he feels dishonored by Murashige’s decision to keep him hostage. Murashige, even before the mysterious murder, seems to know that Kanbei will be useful and his death would be pointless.
The relationship between the two men has a bit of a Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling feel to it, with the samurai needing advice from a man who is also trying to manipulate him, set amidst a slightly surreal, gothic dungeon with a misshapen floor and columns of chains. After doing rhetorical battle with Kanbei, Murashige is able to figure it out, and there’s a Scooby-style reveal to his vassals of what actually happened.
Then, we reset and start the pattern over again with a new mystery to solve. There’s both pleasure and tedium in the repeating format: the satisfaction of detective work and deciphering how the situation in the castle has shifted since our last encounter. But the film’s 147-minute length, slow pace, and detached sterility had me checking my watch every so often until one of its handful of system shocks jolted me back into focus.
The structure, though, is also how Kurosawa explores and interrogates common themes of societal collapse and identity. Murashige is both an outsider to the land and has his own moral and intellectual code that’s resistant to unnecessary violence, as well as to his fellow samurai’s confusing social rigidity and willingness to explain away anything unusual as divine punishment. In trying to solve the various mysteries he presents to his world, he offers realistic answers and paths to a different way, only to be met with a literal reset with the change of season and a new mystery where things seem to get a little worse each time. Kurosawa interrogates how society functions on codes and rules to survive, but what enables it to survive also inevitably sets in motion its own demise.
While I didn’t find the typical movie-going enjoyment in The Samurai and the Prisoner, I found myself continually trying to puzzle through its meaning and the fascinating ways Kurosawa adapts the classic Japanese film genre to his own style. As with his other works, the more I sit with it, the more it seems to reveal.
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