Complete first draft for Reverse Shot.
In the wider cinephile consciousness, the tales of the two legendary directors named Kurosawa are often synonymous with two, entirely separate genres. For Akira, despite the great strides made in recent years by films like High and Low, Dreams, and the ever-popular Ikiru, his reputation still rests on the period jidaigeki films that formed the majority of his career, whether featuring samurai or not. On the other hand, Kiyoshi's films are, aside from their near-uniform contemporary setting, typically lumped in with the wave of Japanese horror that became popular stateside in the late-90s and early-00s, an association that has hovered, not without reason, over such disparate works as his exquisite domestic drama Tokyo Sonata (2008), the introspective travelogue character study To the Ends of the Earth (2019), and the pitch-black Internet thriller satire Cloud (2024), until now his most recent film. The key to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's cinema, however, is his multifaceted approach to genre filmmaking as a whole, each form of storytelling providing its own archetypes and stylistic markers that can be freely mixed even as he maintains supreme control over the film's overall tone and form. Such a project, which he has developed over the course of his forty-plus-year career, reaches a kind of apotheosis in The Samurai and the Prisoner, which many have already dubbed his take on his forebear's own brand of cinema. Adapted from Kokurojo—also the film's Japanese title, which translates to "Black Prison Castle"—Honobu Yonezawa's collection of short mystery novels, it represents only Kurosawa's second period film, after his World War II-set Wife of a Spy (2020), and his first far removed from the present day. As the opening titles speedily establish, it concerns the mysterious 1578 rebellion of Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki), a former retainer of the mighty Oda Nobunaga, resisting his former master's aims to rule all of Japan. While carefully planning his actions in Arioka Castle, he kidnaps Nobunaga's envoy, the wily Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda, the lead of Cloud, here playing a significantly more dynamic character), only to forge an unexpected bond between them as he attempts to uncover the truth behind several bizarre events over the course of the following year, beginning in winter and tied inexorably to the turning of the seasons. After Wife of a Spy, a television film that even in its theatrical version thrums with an uncannily digital, high-frame look that purposely creates a no-mans-land of bright environs and hazy allegiances, it can be something of a shock to see how straight The Samurai and the Prisoner initially takes its setting and attendant genre conventions. Handsomely mounted on an elaborate castle set and bathed in deep color tones brought to vivid life by Kurosawa's steadier-than-ever compositional mastery, the film adheres at first to the appealing logline of a mystery film that happens to take place in 16th-century Japan: the son of a lord who broke his allegiance with Murashige is held captive, despite his plea to be killed as per samurai custom, only to die from a mysterious wound to the back through sliding doors just three inches apart. Through both Murashige's investigations, involving arrow trajectories and interviews with his servants and soldiers, and Kanbei's intellect despite his perpetual confinement in the basement dungeon, the ingenious and tidy solution is uncovered. But this first mystery is by far the shortest and most concrete that The Samurai and the Prisoner will unfurl over its measured two-and-a-half hours. The effect of Murashige's cumulative, increasingly obscure investigations is, more than anything, akin to that of Kurosawa's masterpiece Cure (1997), the ultimate cop movie as all-consuming horror, where the temporary cessation of mounting bodies only brings to bear the impossibility of halting the forces of total destruction. Kurosawa is not after such purely frightening ambitions this time around, though a few shock cuts rank with the greatest brief swerves into a genre that he's ever accomplished, alongside Koji Yakusho's first shot in Tokyo Sonata and Atsuko Maeda traversing the mesmerizing concert hall in To the Ends of the Earth. Instead, Kurosawa's primary thematic concerns are inextricable from his setting: with the Sengoku period comes the first of his films where codes of honor are not nebulous at best, but instead the backbone of virtually every character's behavior. Despite the many people, including Kanbei, who urge Murashige to show no mercy towards his captives or his enemies, he demurs, instead forging his own private path, one which winds through lengthy tea ceremonies as a test of character, confrontations that begin rancorous and end with attempted reconciliation, and, in the end, a choice on both his and Kurosawa's part—the most significant deviation from Yonezawa's text, which instead ends from Kanbei's perspective—that thrusts this lord of unlikely mercy (no matter whether it only worsens the spared's position) into newfound territory, exiting the center stage of history in a manner resonant with the many outsiders left adrift at the end of this filmmaker's mighty works. Many people, including Kiyoshi Kurosawa himself, have cited Throne of Blood as perhaps the key Akira Kurosawa film to consider The Samurai and the Prisoner in relation to. But while Kagemusha feels like the more apposite comparison—a film about a historical lord opposing Oda Nobunaga, a relative lack of conventional action (and only one battle scene, a well-staged nighttime raid on an enemy encampment), a focus on palace subterfuge and plotting across an extended runtime—it might be even more telling to briefly bring in the last time Kurosawa took explicit inspiration from a cinematic master: License to Live (1998), which operates as an exceptionally loose remake of Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), one of Kurosawa's favorite films. He took a few basic elements—an opening quasi-resurrection, a concluding funeral, and an improbable oasis in a relative wasteland—and transformed a melancholy yet comic Western into a thoroughly unclassifiable drama that doesn't even begin to register as a Peckinpah remake until an hour into the film. Just as Kurosawa gleefully remixed a prior film for his own work, here he expands that tendency to encompass an entire tradition of Japanese cinema, setting a figure of power both within and in opposition to everything those films of the past represented. To describe Murashige and the contradictions that he, Motoki's intensely dignified performance, and The Samurai and the Prisoner as a whole carry with such astonishing precision and grace, a few lines from Cable Hogue's eulogy will do: "He wasn't really a good man, he wasn't a bad man. But, Lord, he was a man."
