‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’ Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Shogun Drama

Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown — or in this case, the samurai topknot — in Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s absorbing, clean-lined literary adaptation, for which the veteran filmmaker brings to life a storied period of swirling discontent in Japanese history with such evocative restraint that it becomes distinctly modern. And yet this is no work of genre deconstruction, and there’s little of Kurosawa’s familiar, eerie experimentation with narrative form. Instead, ‘Samurai’ is classical, if pared-back, in approach — at once a satisfyingly linked series of rousing whodunnits, a tricksy game of mental cat-and-mouse and a trenchant, often rather moving, exploration of the nature of true leadership, in all its solitude and sacrifice. 

The leader here is Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki, excelling in portraying the character’s conflicted charisma) the lord of Arioka Castle during the Azuchi era at the end of the 16th century. As our story begins, the formerly loyal Murashige is in rebellion against powerful regional magnate Oda Nobunaga, citing Nobunaga’s cruelty, ruthlessness and thirst for power as his reasons. In response, Nobunaga and his local allies have sent forces to besiege the castle, which has become a fortress. Within its geometric courtyards and spartan, tatami-matted interiors, Murashige paces and plots his next move, consulting with the leaders of the clans under his control and being occasionally comforted by his devout wife Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka) whose enmity toward Nobunaga may outmatch even that of her husband. 

As a last-ditch attempt at a diplomatic resolution, Oda Nobunaga sends an envoy to Arioka castle. Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda, reuniting with Kurosawa after the 2024 thriller “Cloud”) is a samurai famous for his intelligence and political cunning, but his arguments as to why Murashige should return to the Nobunaga fold fall on deaf ears. Kanbei, rebuffed and prevented from leaving, expects to be put to death, according to the samurai code, by which messages are sent and justice dispensed at the tip of a sword.

Instead Murashige orders him imprisoned in the castle’s dungeon, a move that is part clemency, chiming with his recent adoption of a more progressive, and very un-samurai, attitude toward the value of human life (“Do not die for me,” he will later order one of his retainers), but also part strategy. Murashige knows that when word that Kanbei lives on gets back to Nobunaga, the rival lord will assume it can only be because Kanbei switched sides, which will be a useful propaganda coup. Almost all of the decisions Murashige makes are similarly double-edged, like the dagger wears he tucked into the sash of his kimono.   

But then news arrives that one of the lords whose support Murashige was relying on has strayed over to Nobunaga’s side, which presents another dilemma. As was customary in feudal times, the defector’s young son was living with Murashige as a hostage/honored guest, and now that his father has abandoned his patron, the penalty ought to be the child’s death. But quailing at the prospect of killing an 8-year-old boy (and one to whom the childless Chiyoho has become quite attached), however much the boy himself begs to thus atone for his father’s betrayal, instead Murashige orders him spared and protected.

So imagine his feelings of impotence and rage when the boy is killed anyway, by an impossible arrow that finds its target through a tiny crack in a door and then, apparently, vanishes. Is this some kind of supernatural payback for Murashige’s rejection of centuries of samurai tradition or is there a rational explanation? Unable to make sense of the crime, eventually Murashige decides to consult the clever Kanbei, who is bored down there in the dungeon alone, and grateful for the intellectual distraction of solving this puzzle.

It is winter when all this occurs, but before the year is out, there will be three more mysteries, each corresponding to a successive season. In spring, an enemy’s decapitated head, brought back as proof of a successful battle, goes missing. In summer, someone purloins Murashige’s favorite ceramic tea-kettle, which he had intended to give as a valuable gift to seal an alliance. And in autumn a stray bolt of lightning kills a member of the entourage at the exact moment he’s about to reveal an important secret. Each of these enigmatic crimes carries the whiff of divine retribution, which in each case the anti-superstition and non-devout Murashige will seek Kanebi’s help to debunk.

This four-chapter structure and the contained castle with its rooms and courtyards so stripped-down as to appear abstract, can give the whole enterprise the feel of a TV show or miniseries. But in an age when Japan-set period TV literary adaptations have reached the level of sophistication of 2024’s “Shogun,” for example, that is not necessarily a bad thing. DP Yasuyuki Sasaki’s camerawork is stylish and sure and occasionally striking, as in the dungeon that is lit by shafts of light that slice through the cracks in the walls like laser beams. And Koichi Takahashi’s editing keeps things ebbing and flowing within each single section but also finds ways for each to build on and enlarge the one that came before.

But mostly the watchword in the craft design is simplicity, like Kurosawa is preparing a magic trick and showing us, look! No hidden accomplices or secret trapdoors. And it helps to have an uncluttered stage, when the plot is so baroque and the (routinely excellent) cast of clan chiefs and nobles and advisers and trusty retainers is so numerous. Don’t worry — they get fewer all the time: Fans of Genki Kawamura’s “Exit 8,” for example, will be happy to see Kochi Yamato, after his breakout as the creepily smiling Walking Man in the 2025 videogame adaptation, but they are also fairly warned not to get too attached to him.

The same could be said for roughly half the populous but well-differentiated cast. As the seasons pass, the castle ranks are thinned by defection or death, and increasingly it feels like Murashige’s only real friend is the enemy he threw in prison a year ago. Kanbei is locked up but in many ways freer than a weighed-down Murashige, with his proscribed roles and responsibilities and his conflicted loyalty to a code he no longer believes in. Kurosawa’s highly entertaining adaptation knows that just because you are chained does not make you a prisoner, any more than having wealth and power can reliably make you free.