Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) is a rare lord in Japan’s Sengoku period. The Samurai And The Prisoner—Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s first samurai film—begins in 1578, deep in the pre-Edo “Warring States” period, and ruthlessness does not come to Murashige easily. This is making his betrayal of the far more powerful warlord Nobunaga Oba (Bando Shingo) and the impending siege of Arioka Castle a pressing concern. When envoy Kanbei Kuroda (Cloud‘s Musaki Suda) visits to warn the lord about his dismal odds, Murashige tosses him in the dungeon, in direct violation of the samurai code: You either don’t kill the messenger or kill him immediately, making sure to send his head back to his own camp so they don’t think he’s defected.
Almost as a manifestation of the uncertainty surrounding Murashige’s strategy and prospects, over the course of a year at war, he’s confronted with a sequence of inexplicable, “locked-room” mysteries—beginning with a retainer’s son shot with an invisible arrow—that test his capacity for rationality and scrutiny. This leads Murashige to ask the cunning and withholding Kanbei for advice on solving the crime, discovering a cryptic but invaluable source of enlightenment sitting in his cell.
The script is adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s Naoki Prize-winning novel Kokurōjō—a hot literary commodity which justified a bigger budget than many of Kurosawa’s other productions—and interprets the tipping-point tension of the Warring States era as a push between spiritualism and rationalism. There’s a degree of modernity to Murashige that’s not reflected around him, which draws him back to Kanbei and builds a homosocial warmth in sharp contrast to the calm, respectful advice offered by his wife, Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka).
In a pre-modern world, an impossible crime looks a lot like “divine punishment,” a popular rumor in Arioka’s grounds. Heading down into the bare, earthy dungeon cavern offers a refreshing change in focus and perspective. There, Suda gives an entrancing performance with a hint of menace; even though the dynamic originates in Yonezawa’s novel, Murashige’s relationship with his captive echoes Serpent’s Path, with a clueless protagonist hungry for the truth and the capable, beguiling guide leading him to clarity.
Kurosawa is a disciplined director, a firm believer in the power of blocking and editing, but his horror and thriller films clearly bring out a more flashy style than the one he brings to The Samurai And The Prisoner. There is only one battle, captured in quick flashes for maximum impact and minimum screentime, and his camera is most at home in the corridors and corners of Arioka Castle. Beyond the finely detailed Sengoku-era sets, the beautiful Kyoto (standing in for Osaka) locations make for a nice change from the sullen grey cities we saw across Kurosawa’s 2024 trifecta. Curiously, there are basically no close-ups in the whole film (two quick shots of Motoki’s face filling the screen stand out, sudden and memorable), as if Kurosawa needs his audience to see full bodies moving against historic, unyielding architecture, expressing both apprehension and trust with as much of a silhouette as he can fit in a shot.
Not only is The Samurai And The Prisoner Kurosawa’s first samurai film, but the admittedly non-scary film by the king of disaffection and dread is also his deepest dive yet into history. It’s a densely plotted story that trusts its audience to follow the granular details of political schemes and conspiracies, in which nearly every decision and interaction is influenced by the antiquated hierarchical codes of Murashige’s world.
The values of status, duty, and loyalty that influence everybody in Arioka Castle are not revealed to be the film’s themes, but rather key forces affecting the mechanics of mysteries, binding allies to silence, providing persuasive motives for subterfuge, and offering secret access to crime scenes and victims. Kurosawa does not reach for slick, witty propulsion or heavy-handed dramatics—there’s already a world of distance between Kenneth Branagh and Rian Johnson’s whodunnits, and Kurosawa’s resembles neither of them. He instead relishes being in the expansive network of castle sets (including the moody dungeon that feels siloed from the rest of reality), slowing down conversations and interrogations to create apprehension and indecision.
This approach blends Kurosawa’s familiar pacing with an homage to the classical dialogue-heavy samurai films of midcentury Japan, and for periods it can make The Samurai And The Prisoner pretty dry. The episodic structure is great for charting the changing temperature at Arioka Castle, but resetting the mystery momentum multiple times doesn’t do the 147-minute film any favors. The considered, dialogue-heavy detective work means the repeated formula of “crime discovered, fruitless investigation, Kanbei deftly solves it” lacks real tension, despite Murashige’s amusing Poirot/Columbo “let me explain how you did it” monologues blowing the minds of a chorus of retainers.
Once the first mystery is resolved within half an hour, a resetting of expectations is required; The Samurai And The Prisoner is a film about a leader ill-suited to war time, whose detective work serves the dual purpose of discovering the path to victory over Oda and discovering what’s really rotten in his personal Denmark, guided in a slippery, clandestine fashion by Kanbei, an unofficial advisor permanently retained beneath the castle. There’s an openness to Muragishe (symbolized by his hobby as a diligent tea master and tea urn collector) that Kurosawa admires, something fairly rare in his dark, disorientating filmography. It’s this admiration—not to mention the film’s patience and detail—that makes The Samurai And The Prisoner a delightful detour for the genre master.
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Writer: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Masahiro Motoki, Masaki Suda, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Munetaka Aoki, Ryota Miyadate
Release Date: May 19, 2026 (Cannes)
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