‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’ Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Samurai Murder-Mystery Needs a Sharper Blade

Cannes: The J-horror master tries his hand at a classic jidaigeki, with this plodding detective story set within the walls of a besieged 16th century castle.

Invoked several times across his anomalous new feature, a curious but plodding 16th century mystery-drama set within the walls of a Japanese castle as Nobunaga Oda’s army closes in on it, the Buddhist phrase “advance to paradise, retreat into hell” contains a backwards logic that has been adopted by the characters in any number of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films. From “Cure” to “Creepy” and all sorts of dark places in between, the Japanese auteur has crystallized the abstract horrors of the modern world by rendering their shared tendency towards accelerationism — by unflinchingly observing how the greatest threats to our survival are driven by the impulse to push forward (and faster) in the face of a crisis, rather than rethink the source of our collective unrest. 

Indeed, the final scene of Kurosawa’s recent “Cloud” found its web-scammer protagonist arriving at his ultimate moral crossroads, and, in lieu of a more convenient option, joining the devil on a night drive straight into the abyss. It’s rare that someone retreats into hell — they usually bound toward it with both eyes open.

That “The Samurai and the Prisoner” so explicitly confronts that idea, and takes great pains to set it straight, is enough to make this hyper-contained period epic a vintage Kurosawa film at heart. In this case, however, that could mean either Kiyoshi or Akira, as this old-fashioned jidaigeki is otherwise centuries removed from the “Tokyo Sonata” director’s signature milieu, its period setting and stodgy genre tropes making it even more of a curveball than recent departures like “To the Ends of the Earth” and “Wife of a Spy.” Tedious in its plotting but rich in its temporal frictions, this ultra-faithful adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel embraces the time-honored traditions of its form with an eye toward subverting them by the end, an approach that proves apt — if not always satisfying — in the context of a story about a samurai who’s struggling to determine if he should do the same. 

That samurai is none other than Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki), a legend of the Sengoku era who’s still remembered for his seemingly suicidal decision to rebel against Oda’s army as it swept across Japan in 1578. Our story begins in the winter of that year, as Murashige — along with his wife Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka) and the small handful of clans loyal to their family — barricade themselves behind the peripets of Arioka Castle and wait for death to arrive at their doorstep. It does, but not how anyone expects. 

The first person to breach the castle walls isn’t a scout but a master strategist by the name of Kuroda Kanbei (“Cloud” star Masaki Suda), who has come to plead for Murashige to surrender in the hopes that Oda will spare his own family in return. Custom dictates that Murashige should execute his new hostage, but Kurosawa’s protagonist — the rare hero in a filmography full of dark passengers — insists that “killing gains nothing.” 

He chooses instead to lock Kanbei in the castle dungeon (the direst location in a dour-looking movie awash in thick shadows and 1,000 shades of brown), where the strategist will join the child of a rival samurai among Murashige’s prisoners. But when that child is struck dead in the full light of day, Murashige has no choice but to consult Kanbei for help in solving the crime — the first of the four mini whodunnits that constitute this 147-minute film.

“Cornered warrior realizes that he has Sherlock Holmes (or Kogoro Akechi) shackled to a post in his basement” is a great premise for a murder-mystery story, and “The Samurai and the Prisoner” is sparked to life by its shrewd cross-pollination between a jidaigeki and a detective thriller. Each of the cases that Kanbei is asked to solve follows a similar pattern: Someone is struck dead amid the mounting anxiety of Oda’s approach, only for Kanbei to shine light on the situation from the darkness of the castle dungeon. 

One of the murders invites Murashige to consider the true value of his stockpiled treasures, another gives the film a brief and rare opportunity to show the violence that fringes its story on all sides, while the last and most compelling of the lot dares to invoke the possibility of divine intervention. All four of the film’s episodes are separated by the seasons and largely self-contained, what little momentum “The Samurai and the Prisoner” is able to generate between them being owed to the thawing codependency between its title characters, whose relationship inevitably assumes a new dynamic by the time summer gives way to fall. 

The schematic nature of the story’s plot combines with the rigid stiffness of its design to suggest that Kurosawa, who was hired to all but transpose the novel to the screen, could be seen as a modern Kanbei: a brilliant thinker who submitted himself to a situation in which his particular genius would be as much of a liability as it is an asset. I’m sure that Kurosawa was sincerely intrigued by the film’s mysteries, but the sense remains that he was powerless to improve upon them — that his hands were tied by the dry logic of the original text, and would remain so no matter how vigorously he chafed against it. 

The first three cases amount to a mild shrug, and though the fourth benefits from how it ties them all together, its climactic revelations are easy to see coming from a mile away. While shiv-like sharpness of Suda’s performance lends the film a contemporary edge, much of “The Samurai and the Prisoner” is as wooden as the floorboards on which it takes place. There’s a welcome nostalgia to how earnestly Kurosawa embraces the creakiness of classic jidaigeki at a time when so much of the genre has been relegated to TV, but the decision to shoot in muddy color rather than traditional black and white — thematically on point as it might be — makes the movie feel entombed in the husk of an ancient form without any compelling style of its own. 

And yet, “The Samurai and the Prisoner” gains a curious strength as Oda’s army closes in on the castle and the film’s underlying spine begins to jut up a bit more in between the vertebrae of its different chapters. Rather than submit to the inertia of his time and walk backwards into hell like he was banned from the zoo, Matsuhige — deeply affected by his conversations with Kanbei in a different way than we might have thought — begins to appreciate that loyalty can be forged through surrender as much as victory, and that paradise also awaits the meek so long as they mind the right path. 

It’s no surprise that a Kurosawa movie should shrink into itself as it accelerates to the point of no return, but this one allows its lead character the courage to consider that opting out of the future might be the only viable way of changing it. It’s the perfect gracenote for a film that turns to the far-off past for wisdom, and for a filmmaker whose best work reminds us that society will continue to advance for the next 500 years without any sign of heaven to come. 

Grade: C+

“The Samurai and the Prisoner” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Janus will release it in theaters in the United States.

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