Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been successfully operating on two different “tracks” as a filmmaker since the late 1990s: one as a visual/audio stylist and one as a pure storyteller. At the point in 2001 where his best-known works (Cure, Charisma, Pulse) were suddenly released all at once in the U.S., he was doing both things in his features.
In the last decade or so (after a series of truly interesting and bizarre fantasy and thriller narratives) he has “decoupled” these two impulses and thus now makes films that are either radical experiments (like the horror film Chime) or more “literary” pictures that have incredibly sinuous, complex storylines which are the backbone of the entire enterprise (Wife of a Spy, now The Samurai and the Prisoner).
Of course, the U.S. market being what it is (one of many hints: Parasite did not change Americans’ minds about subtitled films, no matter how brilliant and audacious those films might be), the latter strain of films from Kurosawa have gotten rave reviews and have been seen as “viable” for arthouse distribution. At this point I’d note how Americans prefer literary films over cinematic ones, but it should also be stressed that Samurai currently stands as the single most popular film ever by KK in Japan — over 1 billion yen at the box office.
That is not a knock on his latest, The Samurai and the Prisoner, which is an incredibly entertaining and engaging film. It’s just that, after a period of experimentation — in which he made the radically disturbing short feature Chime, the half-creepy stylish thriller/half-pointless shoot-’em-up Cloud, and the unseen-in-the-U.S. French remake of an earlier crime picture, The Serpent’s Path — Kurosawa has once again made a film with an extremely dense screenplay and has again (as with Wife of a Spy) received great reviews and a thorough run on the arthouse circuit in the U.S., thanks to distribution by Janus (the theatrical arm of Criterion).
So, what is the current Kurosawa about? Well, despite it being a period piece set in the time of the samurai, it is decidedly not an action movie. It’s instead a drama with strong elements of mystery and a message about abhorring violence in an era when the most violent men were the most powerful in Japan. And while the film on first glance might seem like Kiyoshi K. succumbing to the lure of making a film similar to the classic samurai sagas of Akira Kurosawa (no relation), it is indeed a more “literary” work (scripted by KK from a novel by present-day author Honobu Yonezawa).
In its broadest outline, the film’s plot is about a series of intrigues between clans in the late 16th century. Specifically, the film deals with the real-life lord Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki), who has taken possession of a castle belonging to the more powerful Lord Oda. He imprisons but refuses to kill an envoy from Oda, Kanbei (Masaki Suda), who is also a brilliant military strategist.
Three mysteries ensue: the first involving the bizarre death-by-arrow of a boy being held as a prisoner by Murashige; the second surrounding the loss of a young army leader’s head (a decisive victory in war in this period was accompanied by possessing the head of one’s enemy); the third involves a gesture toward peace that goes awry when a priest transporting a priceless tea urn is killed before he can deliver the urn to another lord.
In each case, Murashige consults Kanbei, held as a prisoner in the castle’s cellar, for advice about the identity of the culprit. The two develop an unusual relationship of mutual respect and trust (although Kanbei refuses the offer to be liberated from the cellar, knowing that would infuriate the samurai living in the castle).
Just as there are three mysteries and three solutions in the storyline, there are also three climaxes (four, if you count an onscreen epilogue that appears before the closing credits). It’s the kind of film where, even if you’re not going to write a piece like this, it couldn’t hurt to bring along a piece of paper to write down the significant character names to keep track of them all. It’s definitely the kind of film that inspires much conversation among those who have seen it, since the behavior of certain characters can be explained but only after one has seen and thought about the whole picture.
The film’s “literary” bent means that the performances are central to its success. In this regard, Kurosawa chose a talented ensemble, with Motoki and Suda carrying the weight of the picture through the scenes in which their characters review the mysteries (and Kanbei offers oddly poetic solutions to each dilemma). In these moments one does get the impression that Kurosawa is filming a play, as the two characters’ ongoing battle of intellects and wills in one room is more important than the larger-scale events taking place outside the castle. Also, Yuriko Yoshitaka, playing Murashige’s wife Chiyoho, distinguishes herself with an excellent scene near the end of the film.
Kurosawa chose not to shoot the film in a widescreen ratio — which basically communicates to alert viewers straight off that this will not be an epic saga in the manner of Akira Kurosawa. In fact, the film’s only all-out battle scene, which takes place about 45 minutes into the proceedings, is onscreen briefly and is included to give us at least one glimpse of the warriors in action.
And while Chime (2024) was the height of KK’s experimentation in recent years (it’s a creepy and disturbing horror film with a carefully crafted tone that is communicated through the visuals and an ominous sound design), Samurai does have some traces of Kurosawa’s experimental style. These are present primarily in the meetings between Murashige and Kanbei, where a heavy wind is often heard below the voices of the two protagonists.
One of the most interesting aspects of the plot is that Murashige is a leader who at several points doesn’t seem cut out to be a leader, because he is such a pacifist. He declares at one point, “War sickens and disgusts me,” and throughout the film we see him make decisions that will move him and his warriors away from battle. This is attributed in the dialogue to him being an “outsider” who doesn’t quite belong in the position he has assumed; in a flashback, we see him beheading a group of maids at the urging of the man he rebelled against (Oda Nobunaga), and it is clear it was one of the most traumatizing events of his life.
In closing, I must mention a film that I excerpted recently on the Funhouse TV show: the undistributed-in-the-U.S. “comeback” film by Takeshi Kitano (aka Beat Takeshi), Kubi (2023). The film was Beat’s first samurai film, and it was made with many nods to Akira Kurosawa but also contains many incidents that align perfectly with Beat’s own dark and perverse brand of humor. The reason I bring up Kubi is that it was also based on a modern novel (in this case, a novel by Beat himself) that included Murashige and Oda as major characters.
This will mean nothing to most viewers, who haven’t even heard of Kubi let alone seen it. But the films would form a fascinating double bill, because the same issues (of what makes a good leader, and how the level of violence one displayed in this era determined how much respect one got) are covered in both films, and the beheading of the maids scene is also present in Kubi (albeit not as a flashback).
Comparing these two works is indeed instructive, as Kitano did make a samurai epic while Kiyoshi Kurosawa has made both a period piece infused with a mystery-driven plotline and a character study of a leader who is constantly questioning his own leadership — if not, why would he be consulting a man he has taken prisoner and condemned to the cellar of his castle?
As a bonus, here’s a clip from my 2001 interview with Kurosawa, where I asked him about the particular use of sound in his films.