The Samurai and the Prisoner

Adam Nayman

From my press notes for Janus : “The master of horror label fits Kurosawa even as it belies the true range of his output, and the deceptive elasticity of his style as well. The movie version of The Samurai and the Prisoner—faithfully adapted by the director from Yonezawa’s best-seller—is an outlier in his filmography; it’s also, paradoxically, a culmination, a stately and scenic detour through historical and metaphysical territory that intersects with Japan’s literary and cinematic legacies while plumbing its own subterranean (and contemporary) depths of suggestion. For Kurosawa, form follows function, and Kokurojo is meticulously designed on every level; its spartan interior spaces and treacherously twisty plot lines are labyrinths leading back to a great artist’s singular concerns. “

Brian Tallerico4.5

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kokurojo is a bit of Shakespeare and a bit of Samurai Columbo. I could have watched it for hours.

davidehrlich2.5

Invoked several times across his anomalous new feature, a curious but plodding 16th century mystery-drama set within the walls of a Japanese castle as Nobunaga Oda’s army closes in on it, the Buddhist phrase “advance to paradise, retreat into hell” contains a backwards logic that has been adopted by the characters in any number of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films. From “Cure” to “Creepy” and all sorts of dark places in between, the Japanese auteur has crystallized the abstract horrors of the modern world by rendering their shared tendency towards accelerationism — by unflinchingly observing how the greatest threats to our survival are driven by the impulse to push forward (and faster) in the face of a crisis, rather than rethink the source of our collective unrest. Indeed, the final scene of Kurosawa’s recent “Cloud” found its web-scammer protagonist arriving at his ultimate moral crossroads, and, in lieu of a more convenient option, joining the devil on a night drive straight into the abyss. It’s rare that someone retreats into hell — they usually bound toward it with both eyes open.That “The Samurai and the Prisoner” so explicitly confronts that idea, and takes great pains to set it straight, is enough to make this hyper-contained period epic a vintage Kurosawa film at heart. In this case, however, that could mean either Kiyoshi or Akira, as this old-fashioned jidaigeki is otherwise centuries removed from the “Tokyo Sonata” director’s signature milieu, its period setting and stodgy genre tropes making it even more of a curveball than recent departures like “To the Ends of the Earth” and “Wife of a Spy.” Tedious in its plotting but rich in its temporal frictions, this ultra-faithful adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel embraces the time-honored traditions of its form with an eye toward subverting them by the end, an approach that proves apt — if not always satisfying — in the context of a story about a samurai who’s struggling to determine if he should do the same.~this review continues on IndieWire~