Inside a feudal Japanese castle ringed by a warlord’s army, a series of impossible killings begins to turn a besieged court against itself — and the cornered lord, unable to find the culprit, seeks counsel from the one man cunning enough to unmask the murderer: a brilliant strategist he has chained in his own dungeon.
Such is the set-up for The Samurai and the Prisoner, the latest feature from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Four and a half decades and some 30 films into his career, it is the acclaimed Japanese genre master’s first samurai movie. Janus Films snapped up U.S. rights to the film after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May and will release it in theaters on July 31. The company dropped the samurai saga’s first trailer on Thursday (see it below).
For Kurosawa — the restless genre stylist behind the serial-killer classic Cure, the J-horror landmark Pulse and, most recently, the psychological thriller Cloud — making a jidaigeki (Japan’s genre of feudal samurai movies) had been one of the longest unrealized ambitions of his career. Set in Japan’s 16th century Warring States period, The Samurai and the Prisoner is adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel Kokurojo, a winner of Japan’s prestigious Naoki Prize.
Masahiro Motoki, star of the Oscar-winning drama Departures, plays Lord Araki Murashige, a real-life vassal who rebelled against the warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1578 and barricaded himself inside Arioka Castle. As Oda’s forces press in from the outside, a killing within the walls spirals into a string of inexplicable crimes, and the besieged Murashige strikes an uneasy bargain with Kanbei (Masaki Suda, the recent lead of Kurosawa’s Cloud), a dangerous strategist he has detained in his dungeon. The ensemble cast also includes Yuriko Yoshitaka, Joe Odagiri, Munetaka Aoki, Ryota Miyadate and Tasuku Emoto.
Kurosawa, who also wrote the adaptation, shot the film in a richly shadowed classical style with cinematographer Yasuyuki Sasaki. It was produced by Shochiku — the 130-year-old studio behind Ozu’s classics, as well as Departures — in association with Tokyo Broadcasting System Television.
“I’ve always had this desire to make a jidaigeki film one day, but to do so nowadays takes a lot of money,” Kurosawa told THR ahead of Cannes, noting the elaborate sets, locations, wigs, makeup and costumes the classical style demands. “I just never really had the opportunity given to me until now.”
Kurosawa said he revisited numerous Jidaigeki classics —the works of Akira Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi, and Kenji Mizoguchi —while developing his approach to The Samurai and the Prisoner. Hashing out his simple ambitions for the project, he added: “I wanted to try a classic film in a similar style to the great older films that came before me.”