The Flip Side of the Coin

By Ryan Swen The Samurai and the Prisoner Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, Janus Films While it would be foolish to downplay the influence or the achievement of the films that made Kiyoshi Kurosawa a de facto figurehead of the late '90s and early '00s wave of Japanese horror, it has been common for many stateside to use his facility with the genre as shorthand, a set of definable expectations that does a disservice to the breadth of his abilities. The key to Kurosawa's cinema is his multifaceted approach to genre filmmaking, each storytelling configuration providing its own archetypes and stylistic markers that can be freely mixed even as he maintains supreme control over tone and form. Accordingly, films like his exquisite domestic drama Tokyo Sonata (2008), the introspective travelogue To the Ends of the Earth (2019), and the pitch-black Internet thriller satire Cloud (2024) refuse to belong cleanly to a single genre, and even a more easily classifiable horror film like Pulse (2001) gradually morphs into a mournful, apocalyptic death march. Such a project, which he has developed over the course of his 40-plus-year career, reaches a kind of apotheosis in The Samurai and the Prisoner. Adapted from Kokurōjō—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, who resists 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 adroitly playing a significantly more expressive character), only to forge an unexpected bond with him as he attempts to uncover the truth behind several bizarre events, beginning in winter and continuing over the course of four seasons. After Wife of a Spy, a film made for Japanese television 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 elaborate castle sets and utilizing Kurosawa's steadier-than-ever compositional mastery to capture long walkways, imposing towers, and the shadowy basement dungeon in which Kanbei is perpetually confined, the film conforms at first to the appealing logline of a murder mystery 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 inside the castle from a mysterious wound to the back. Through both Murashige's investigations—involving arrow trajectories and interviews with his servants and soldiers—and Kanbei's intellect—cloaked in diffident inquiries and poetic riddles—the ingenious and tidy solution is uncovered. However, 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, and by the end the panoply of names and competing allegiances stretching across Arioka Castle dwarfs the plot convolutions of any of Kurosawa's previous films. While it is possible to view the accumulation of details as mere busywork, it feels more in line with Kurosawa's interests to regard them as a slow, increasingly nightmarish downward spiral, each breach in security another step into an illogical realm perceived by many of Murashige's retainers as divine punishment. In that sense, The Samurai and the Prisoner is strikingly reminiscent of Kurosawa's masterpiece Cure (1997), the ultimate cop movie as all-consuming horror, where the temporary cessation of mounting bodies only demonstrates the impossibility of halting evil itself. Kurosawa is not after such frightening aims this time around, but his ultimate destination is equally ambitious: a moral exploration of an entire epoch. For the first time, the Sengoku period allows him to depict codes of honor that are not the nebulous concept only sometimes obeyed in the modern society of his past films, but instead the rigid backbone of this era's behavior. Despite the many underlings who urge Murashige to show no mercy towards his captives or enemies, he demurs, instead forging his own private path. Through lengthy tea ceremonies as tests of character, confrontations that begin rancorous and end with attempted reconciliation, and roundabout negotiations using the most unlikely of collateral, Murashige's approach—in tandem with the intense dignity of Motoki's performance—never quite adheres to the prescribed actions demanded of him by the weight of tradition, proceeding in odd, even ungainly feints and changes of heart that resemble the unpredictable rhythms of the film surrounding him. His attempts to spare his hostages often only result in further bloodshed, actively worsening the position of his spared captives, and yet his unyielding nature becomes a fully formed ethos, one yearning to be understood by lionhearted vassal and shrewd tactician alike. In the end, a choice on both Murashige and Kurosawa's part—the most significant deviation from Yonezawa's text, which instead ends from Kanbei's perspective—thrusts the daimyo into newfound territory, exiting the center stage of history to pursue a different way of life. It is that alignment of character and director's intent, a rejection of the expected, easily definable forms of behavior for one, genre for the other, in favor of a more unconventional, indefinite existence, that pushes The Samurai and the Prisoner closest to Kurosawa's past works. Like his quietly enigmatic protagonist, the modern master offers no easy answers for how even a lord attempting to transcend his time can reckon with overpowering calamity, but the patient eloquence with which he poses these questions builds a film as labyrinthine and monumental as Arioka Castle itself.