Fantasia Extra: The Samurai and the Prisoner

I've got to admit, I thought I'd be well past the point in posting my reviews from Fantasia where I talked about how I saw something else because this was already listed as a coming attraction at the Coolidge so I knew I'd be able to see it and could thus prioritize something that might not come around Boston - the "no time during the festival/tough getting back into writing about it" funk has hit early this year! I'm trying, though!

Anyway, as it turns out, I didn't go to the Coolidge because, smug as I was about being out of town while the Red Line was shut down, the MBTA whacked me with a major Green Line shutdown once I got back, and that made a lot of shows there tricky - it's a long enough movie that they're running it at about 6:15pm, which would be right on the border of getting there from my apartment on the Green Line, much less the 66 bus (shuttle buses are Right Out). Surprisingly, though, it was playing Boston Common - "surprising" in that his last couple horror movies played the Brattle and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's last mainstream film, Wife of a Spy, didn't play Boston at all (I was fortunate to see it while on vacation in Washington, DC) - and had a surprisingly full house for a mid-week screening of a 147-minute Japanese period mystery. I don't know what to read into that; maybe the Brattle's showing a fair amount of Kurosawa over the past year has raised his profile around here, maybe the trailers have played before anime; maybe everyone has seen Spider-Man and The Odyssey and the more mainstream releases that came out last weekend weren't of much interest. Heck, maybe someone at AMC realized that a lot of the local fandom is north of the river and weren't messing with the 66 this weekend.

Surprisingly, it doesn't look like it will be held over downtown - there is a lot coming out this weekend, and maybe they figure this is the sort of thing that has a steep dropoff after folks see it during week one - but it's going to continue at the Coolidge, and is well worth a trip.


Kokurôjô (The Samurai and the Prisoner)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 August 2026 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or buy the novel or soundtrack at Amazon

I'm not sure exactly when I had the thought "this is pretty Kurosawa-esque" during my viewing of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner, but I had to laugh a bit and wonder if he had waited so long to do a samurai movie because he knew that his surname meant it would be compared to some of the greatest films of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. That would be absurdly unfair, especially since it would be almost impossible for any Japanese director to not be influenced by Akira, so if you see any of the (unrelated) sensei in this movie, it just shows that Kiyoshi knows what he's doing, and that's no surprise.

The story begins in 1578, when Nobunaga Oda was seeking to unite Japan, and one of his generals, Lord Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) suddenly broke from him, holing up in the impregnable castle city of Arioka. Oda sends an old friend, Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda) as an emissary, but rather than sending Kanbei's head back as a refusal of Oda's proposal, Murashige locks him in the dungeon, which may leave Kanbei's hostage son forfeit if Oda believes he has switched allegiances. Murashige, it seems, is generally not keen on this sort of diplomatic murder, as he also imprisons one of his own hostages when his father joins Oda rather than executing the child. The boy soon winds up dead anyway, seemingly shot by a vanishing arrow, the first of four murders over the course of a year that seem like divine retribution for Murashige breaking with Oda and defying the code of the samurai, each sending him to the dungeon to see if the brilliant Kabnei can help him crack the cases.

The opening crawl notes that history does not record why Murashige broke with Oda; Kurosawa and Honobu Yonezawa (who wrote the original novel) have some ideas, but one doesn't need to know the ins and outs of Japanese military history to see that their Murashige, at the very least, finds the sorts of executions he is frequently called upon to perform wasteful and counterproductive: Oda's cruelty, he wagers, will make his reign short-lived as it will breed rebellion and deprive him of his best advisors. He's not exactly a pacifist, but his relatively modern ideas in this area certainly seem unpragmatic in the face of a remorseless enemy and allies who are part of a society that uses the threat of death as glue. Often, this is the story of a man whose nobility is revealed to be naive or even his downfall, but Kurosawa, to his credit, seems as interested in how it might work as in how it can't, examining how a smart man whose priority is avoiding casualties maneuvers in an arena where most are explicitly expendable.

I like the way Masahiro Motoki plays Murashige; there's the intelligence of a sharp tactician in unfamiliar territory to him, someone trying to change the world but accustomed to the deference that present circumstances give him, and occasionally the realization that what he's saying is going to sound like weakness as it comes out of his mouth. It's an exercise in whether or not you can have the air of a samurai without the threat of imminent violence. Masaki Suda is a fine contrast, whip smart, clearly deserving of respect though arrogant and enough of a true believer to be consistently angry over his survival rather than grateful and/or shamed. The respect but violent disagreement the pair share makes each time Murashige consults Kanbei fascinating, especially as Murashige is showing the wear of a slowly disintegrating situation above as Kanbei seemingly becomes both more feral and sharper, like he's spending months plotting potential next steps and losing his grip doing so.

The rest of the cast is fair, with Yuriko Yoshitaka the main standout as Murashige's wife Chiyoho. Once challenge a film like this has is that Murashige is going to have a bunch of subordinates, all very competent and pledged to a fairly rigid code, and on top of that, the film is broken into four chapters, with each murder mystery representing a season. Sometimes the writers can re-use characters, and sometimes a new mystery needs new ones, and sometimes they need to kill someone significant off to raise the stakes or thin out Murashige's base of support as time goes on. Munetaka Aoki and Joe Odagiri do a particularly nice job of making their particular retainers distinguish themselves, although a couple aren't quite up to the challenge of being briefly important in a long movie. That said, a lot of TV writers could probably take notes at how well Kurosawa (and presumably Yonezawa) structure a set of individual episodes that can be fairly procedural into an arc that builds to a finish.

Kurosawa often makes horror movies that play in the banal (or dark and hidden) corners of the present day, so it's a nifty change of pace to see him given the money for nice costumes and shooting on an impressively dressed location, although he often returns to the same locations, which feel tighter each time (the meeting room seems to shrink with Murashige's diminishing number of allies to the point where it seems difficult to get a camera in there). The interesting exception is the dungeon, which seems surprisingly vast with its undulating dirt floor, like Murashige is free when he comes to visit Kanbei, at least as far as expectations are concerned, even if his counterpart is pointedly kept anchored in one spot and well aware of it. Kurosawa, like his namesake, often seems to consciously stage meetings between samurai and flashbacks as theater, not quite making jokes out of the shuffling gates or the way characters will move about a room while sitting to respect hierarchy but making sure the audience recognizes the absurdity of it.

He also makes a valiant effort to fight how this sort of film can bog down in the later episodes, as well as how a man's efforts to avoid violence in a violent world can wind up feeling less that cathartic; you can feel history start to box him in a bit toward the end, when the specifics of various military/diplomatic tactics start to become a bit more important. The movie doesn't really fizzle, just reaches a point where it's hard to re-energize for a third or fourth time, and thankfully Kurosawa can see when it's about to break and wraps things up without it seeming rushed.

Kurosawas, it turns out, are pretty good at samurai movies, and I wouldn't mind seeing Kiyoshi try another one now that the seal's been cracked.