★★★★☆
The Japanese master of dread swaps haunted apartments for a besieged castle, and the political scheming proves every bit as doom-laden.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the power behind Cure and Pulse, has made a samurai film. Don’t come expecting swordfights by the bucketload. His first period piece, adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s prizewinning novel, is a castle-bound whodunit: Agatha Christie by candlelight, with a pinch of Columbo.
It’s winter 1578. Lord Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) has turned on the warlord Oda Nobunaga, and his fortress at Arioka is under siege. When Nobunaga sends an envoy, Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda, of Kurosawa’s Cloud), Murashige breaks samurai custom. Rather than send him back or kill him, he chains him in the dungeon. Then a string of baffling locked-room mysteries breaks out inside the castle walls, and Murashige keeps creeping downstairs to consult the one man who might know how it was done.
Each mystery nests inside the next, and Kurosawa stages the conversations like duels. Motoki plays Murashige as a strange kind of warlord, a tea connoisseur who would rather not kill anyone if he can help it. Suda, a voice from the dark, makes a magnetic Hannibal Lecter in a topknot. The real question is less who did each deed than who is pulling whose strings.
Horror fans, take note: this isn’t a scary film, but the old Kurosawa is lurking. He knows exactly what to do with an empty doorway or a corridor that fades to black, and the dungeon is a pit that seems to swallow the light. There’s a seam of gallows humour running through it too.
At nearly two and a half hours of talk, it asks for patience, and the names and allegiances come thick and fast. Let them wash over you. By the second hour the plots are folding in on one another, and the film has you in its grip. To misquote David Lynch: We are like the schemer who schemes, and then lives inside the scheme… but who is the schemer?
The Samurai and the Prisoner played at Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam.