The Samurai and the Prisoner Blends Agatha Christie And Akira Kurosawa — And It Really Works

The Samurai and the Prisoner follows the blueprint of a cozy mystery. It’s a chamber piece, and takes place in a small town of sorts — a walled castle under siege — where an amateur sleuth — the lord of the castle, Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) — solves a series of mysteries. These are all classic whodunnits, mysterious murders that happen offscreen and are resolved by the time the seasons change and the next chapter begins. For this reason, fans of the genre will find pleasure in director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s faithful adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s prize-winning 2021 novel. But that’s only one aspect of this multifaceted film, which has the intrigue of an Agatha Christie story and the gravitas of an Akira Kurosawa epic.

Best known for his horror films about techno-alienation (2001’s Pulse, for example, or last year’s Cloud), The Samurai and the Prisoner is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first foray into the jidaigeki genre (loosely, a Japanese term for stories set in the pre-modern era). The film is set in the year 1578, during a turbulent period of infighting known as the Sengoku Period. Lord Murashige has just made the risky decision to defy tyrannical warlord Nobunaga Oda (Bando Shingo), and tensions are high among the warriors, courtiers, servants, and prisoners who live in the castle as they prepare for a months-long siege.

So when Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda), an emissary from a rival clan, arrives with a warning, everyone, including Kanbei, expects Murashige to execute him on sight. Instead, however, the samurai keeps the canny Kanbei alive, choosing instead to lock him up in the castle dungeon. In many ways, Lord Murashige is a modern man living in a feudal society: He rejects the concept of omens and superstitions about divine punishment, and questions the validity of doing things simply because that’s how they’ve always been done. Sparing Kanbei is one of those ahead-of-its-time decisions, one that will have major implications for both the film’s themes and its plot.

Murashige’s wife Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka) is a devoted Buddhist, adding a metaphysical dimension to these philosophical musings. This element is best summed up in a saying that’s repeated multiple times throughout both the novel and the film: “Advance to paradise, retreat into hell.” The spirit of victory at any cost that drives this mantra is incompatible with modern ideas about leadership, and Murashige is uncomfortable asking everyone around him to perish for his honor as he moves forward with his rebellion. And although she’s the one who first utters it, Chiyoho eventually takes a more nuanced approach to this idea, and her counsel becomes essential as Murashige tries to appease both his conscience and his men’s bloodlust.

This is where Kanbei comes back into the picture, eventually becoming a trusted advisor to Murashige as the months wear on. Spies and enemy agents are all around, which means both that people keep turning up dead and that Murashige has to catch the culprits in order to maintain order at the castle. The Samurai and the Prisoner is structured around these investigations, and Kanbei serves as a sort of Sherlock Holmes chained up in Murashige’s basement, analyzing the cases and providing clues in exchange for small comforts. Eventually, these enemies come to a place of mutual respect, if not quite trust, in each other’s motives.

The mystery elements of The Samurai and the Prisoner are enjoyable on their own, with cleverly executed twists and satisfying conclusions to each individual murder. The dialogue and plotting can both be quite dense, so it’s for the best that Kurosawa stays close to the formal compositions and standard aspect ratio of classic jidaigeki films. Similarly, many of those movies were shot in black and white, and the color palette here is left muted save for a few bright shots of autumn foliage. (In a poetic touch, the four chapters of the film are structured around the four seasons.)

That’s not to say that Kurosawa doesn’t bring any of his signatures to the film: The director uses the labyrinthine hallways and sliding shoji screens of traditional Japanese architecture to create a sense of claustrophobia and dread worthy of a horror movie, for example. On the whole, however, this is a departure, a deliberately old-fashioned film that’s got a lot on its mind: the tension between tradition and innovation, between superstition and science, how our times shape us and how we shape our times.

It’s worth noting that detective stories as we know them today did not exist in 16th-century Japan, so the mere act of blending them adds another metatextual layer to this already complex film. The pairing is fresh, and the elements mesh surprisingly well, held together by thoughtful craft and heady themes. Whether you’re going in as a fan of Columbo or chanbara, either way there’s something to appeal to everyone who likes a good old-fashioned mystery tale.

From Janus Films, The Samurai and the Prisoner is playing in limited theaters now.