The great Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been so prolific over the years and has signed his name to so many unforgettable films that it’s hard to believe that his latest, The Samurai and the Prisoner, is his first effort in the jidaigeki genre of period dramas. His first samurai picture, in other words. Based on the 2021 novel Kokurojo by the acclaimed mystery novelist Honobu Yonezawa, Kurosawa’s movie (which premiered at Cannes earlier this year to a warm reception) is a curious, absorbing hybrid, as if a samurai film had been crossed with a Sherlock Holmes flick. What ultimately emerges is a fascinating existential drama about mercy and sacrifice, about the individual and the state.
Set in 1578, the film unfolds against a gathering war in which various, mostly unseen nobles and generals appear to be reconsidering their alliances. Samurai Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) has rebelled against his master, Oda Nobunaga (Bando Shindo), and now waits at his heavily fortified Arioka Castle for word of which other samurai might be joining him. Murashige’s old friend, Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda), comes to him as an envoy from Lord Oda, advising him that he can’t win and urging him to give up. For strategic reasons, Murashige imprisons Kanbei in his dungeon. He then winds up enlisting his old friend’s help in solving a series of mysteries that emerge over the next year. (These characters are real historical personages, and Murashige’s rebellion did in fact happen, but this specific story is fictional.)
The film is split into four sections, each marked by a season and centering on a new puzzle, be it an unexplained murder, a severed head that suddenly changes expression, or a seemingly supernatural assassination. When Murashige visits Kanbei in his subterranean dungeon, he gets brilliant but gnomic answers that reveal little at first. (Sample line of dialogue: “Inside and out, cause and effect, exoteric and esoteric.”) Sometimes the greater secret is not what Murashige is trying to solve but what Kanbei is actually saying; the mystery becomes poetry and vice versa. These exchanges, in which the two men also discuss the demands of leadership, intricate strategies of betrayal, and the nature of mercy, feel foundational, as if in this dark realm beneath Arioka Castle, surrounded by supporting pillars and roots, they’re laying bare the forces that keep things going aboveground. Upstairs, of course, Murashige is surrounded by vassals who are bound to order and tradition: They’re baffled when he refuses to kill his prisoners, flabbergasted when he seems opposed to beheadings.
The mysteries themselves are not exactly head-scratchers. Rather, they gradually reveal the increasing desperation of this barricaded and hierarchical society. The action rarely leaves the confines of Arioka Castle, which means that a lot of what’s happening (and to whom) is relayed to us through dialogue littered with names of people we’ve never met and about whom we know almost nothing. That can be disorienting, but it’s clearly intentional on Kurosawa’s part: We grasp how little these characters know of what’s happening beyond the walls of this fortress. And the increasingly high-pressure environment feels ready to explode in some way.
A lot of period films can be explained by imagining the protagonist as an unwitting time traveler, someone with more modern and relatable attitudes somehow trapped in an alien era. (The Odyssey is one of those movies.) A similar dynamic develops in The Samurai and the Prisoner, as we gradually learn the reasons for Murashige’s rebellion and his flouting of tradition and ritual. This is a powerful man whose clear but inexpressible discomfort at what is expected of him slowly becomes a more pointed awareness of the irrational cruelty of the society he inhabits, even as he continues to abide by its rules. The film’s central puzzle thus becomes something more profound than the sum of its smaller mysteries: the question of how to achieve freedom in a world that seems to have no place for it.
