Kiyoshi Kurosawa has made murder mysteries before – many, in fact. In his films, violence shivers randomly across the placid surface of life, like a lake troubled by the leap of a fish that’s already disappeared back below the surface by the time you see the ripples. But the mystery is less about whodunnit than why, and what lurks in depths of the human psyche; customarily in Kurosawa – perhaps most notably in the serial-killer-by-proxy procedural Cure, possibly the scariest film ever made – murder is utterly severed from comprehensible human motivation, carried out with a coldness that seems cultivated by the alienating conditions of modern life itself. There’s no reason why it should happen, but equally no reason why it shouldn’t.
His new film, The Samurai and the Prisoner, is a departure, both because its mysteries are solvable according to the rules of the Golden Age detective story, which it follows more respectfully than the Knives Out films; and because the solving of them affirms a humanist principle about the value of an individual life, in keeping with the film’s anguished philosophizing about divine justice and the pointless brutality of bushido.
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The film is set in 1578, during the “Warring States period” of Japanese history. By this point in “this age of war,” as the characters call it, feudal Japan has been in more or less constant conflict for something like 100 years, and honor codes around killing, which seem to glorify violence and cheapen human life, are beginning to weigh on the daimyo Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki), who has turned against the all-conquering Oda Nobunaga, and is now under siege in Arioka Castle (Araki and Nobunaga are real historical figures, and the siege of Arioka Castle a significant historical event; the dates and battles and political machinations of the film are broadly accurate). When an emissary from Nobunaga, Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda), arrives with a proposition, Araki refuses his entreaty; but rather than behead him, as tradition demands and Kuroda requests, Araki locks him in the basement of his castle. As he explains to his wife Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka), herself the survivor of a religious massacre, he simply can’t countenance it anymore; similarly, when a former ally betrays him and aligns with Nobunaga, Araki refuses to kill the lord’s prepubescent son, already held as a hostage – even though the boy begs him to. But soon enough, he’s murdered anyway, seemingly shot by an arrow through a slender crack in an open screen door, though no arrow is evident at the crime scene.
It’s almost a locked-room mystery, and Araki approaches it like a detective, interviewing suspects one by one – they face each other while kneeling on a tatami mat instead of sitting at opposite sides of an appropriated desk in a country house – and performing period-appropriate forensics, testing out hypotheses about the arrow’s angle of approach and the archer’s vantage. At an impasse, he heads down to the basement, where Kuroda is chained to a pillar, in the center of a room whose sand flood undulates like the dunes in the Room in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. He hands over his investigation notes to Kuroda, who quickly grasps the solution, and reveals it to his jailer in the form of a riddle. The film, a series of linked mysteries building to a final twist, will repeat this structure in its subsequent chapters; Araka, trying to keep his people alive and his vassals onside in a losing war, comes to trust Kuroda most of all, even as his prisoner plays mind games with him.
Though their relationship is a bit like Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector – Kuroda even goads one of his guards to his death, as Dr. Lector did to his fellow-inmate Miggs in Silence of the Lambs. But the mysteries they solve, four in all as the film unfolds across the seasons of the yearlong siege, are more like Father Brown stories; Kuroda semi-miraculously intuits the precise outlines of elaborate plots whose resolutions invariably contain a kernel of moral instruction. (Though more likely to be a Buddhist paradox than a Catholic homily.) Honobu Yonezawa, who wrote the 2021 novel which Kurosawa has closely adapted, was best known for his young adult mysteries before The Samurai and the Prisoner became a bestseller; it shows off the enduring Japanese respect for the classic English murder mystery, while also allowing Kurosawa to advance its themes with straight-bat dialogue that recalls Masaki Kobayashi at his most didactic.
Like Kurosawa’s previous period film, the espionage drama Wife of a Spy, The Samurai and the Prisoner is only subtly sly in its engagement with genre conventions, and it’s likewise resourceful in confining its action largely to meticulously controlled interiors. Kurosawa films the Arioka Castle sets elegantly, with rectilinear framings, and stages scenes of self-sacrifice and slaughter in the courtyard, in the manner of revisionist samurai films like Kobayashi’s Harakiri. In the decades after the Second World War, directors like Kobayashi used the jidaigeki to advance a skeptical outlook about an ethos of honor and militarism; the dialogue of The Samurai and the Prisoner, which frequently explores both Christian and Buddhist notions of the afterlife and divine punishment and reward, is more universal in its concerns – as well as being applicable to the ambient violence that characterizes so many of Kurosawa’s films. “Killing is meaningless” is the takeaway from Cure, too, but the difference is that in The Samurai and the Prisoner, the sentiment is not felt but said, and not existentially terrifying but righteously indignant.
