Katanas out in ‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’

However, Murashige is soon forced to question the motives of those around him, when, one by one—once per season, in fact—a murder, a theft, or some kind of beguiling switcheroo sends him into a paranoid tailspin. It isn’t long before he’s driven to seek Kanbei’s wisdom to solve each mounting mystery. But all the while, his forward-thinking drive to challenge long-standing, violent traditions (starting with his refusal to kill Kanbei) end up having unintended ripple effects, like his allies questioning his fitness to lead. It isn’t just enemies Murashige has to uncover, but quite possibly associates too, for whom the appearance of honor is as important as military victories.

The minor mysteries end up less important than you might expect for a film built around sifting through numerous clues. However, underlying each skirmish are questions of evolving belief systems, and men grasping the structures of the past, as Murashige wades into an uncertain future. The Samurai and the Prisoner is, in this way, strikingly modern as a piece of intellectual cinema, but it’s also distinctly classical in its visual approach, as Kurosawa taps into the stage-like movements and dramatic rhythms typical of jidaigeki. To create the film’s reality, he casts a murderer’s row of incredible performers, some of whom he’s worked with before—like Suda, who starred in his recent tech thriller Cloud, and Mutsuo Yoshioka from his visceral horror short Chime in a smaller role—alongside diligent character actors like Yamato Kochi, who you might recognize from the video game horror of Exit 8. And although the film is a far cry from his typical tech horror, the actors tap into liminal emotions that make a mystery film worthwhile, even when the answers are far less important than the questions and their implications. Suda, for instance, playing Murashige’s inadvertent vizier, seems to subtly switch modes, between outwardly trustworthy and a black hole of motivation. As much as he assists in solving the palace mysteries, his own objectives (and his feelings about his situation) may well be the biggest mystery of all.

The movie rarely leaves the castle’s lavish interiors (filmed on five different locations, but strung together seamlessly as one), creating a sense of subtle, gradual claustrophobia as the film wears on. Kurosawa allows his actors to traipse about the space, exploring it and, in a sense, defining it through their imagination, as we’re left to wonder what the world outside might look like. This stage-like approach is vital to the film’s unfurling, as it allows Kurosawa to flip a stylistic switch from contemporary tech thrillers, like his twin Serpent’s Path features, to the careful control of a modern samurai throwback.

However, in approaching this formally rigid genre (and despite paying homage to it), the film’s boundaries also form a philosophical structure of sorts, the kind that protagonist Murashige bristles against, as he tries to re-invent himself from within the confines of time and place. For instance, Kurosawa and his cinematographer Yasuyuki Sasaki largely hang back and let the spaces (and the characters’ blocking) speak for themselves. However, in the rare moments of intense realization, this deadlock is broken, as editor Kôichi Takahashi punches into the rare and fleeting close ups, which feel almost at odds with the rest of the movie.

And yet, these result in dramatic beats that crystalize the drama at hand. The film, in the process, connects past and present through not just the characters’ philosophical struggles—at a moment when Buddhism and Christianity came into conflict in the region—but through the warring aesthetics of the individual and the collective. Who the camera observes or identifies with in a given moment (A space? A clan? A leader?) is as dilemmatic as the story at hand, turning The Samurai and the Prisoner into modern cinematic folklore. It’s as thought provoking as it is soul rendering, and although its revelations may not surprise you (which is to say, the “who” of the “whodunnit;” there are only so many characters), they reveal underlying complexities that challenges everything the story and its supposed hero are about, forcing the movie to linger in your mind long after it’s done.