Kiyoshi Kurosawa turns feudal intrigue into an elegant puzzle-box murder mystery.
In sixteenth-century Japan, rebel lord Murashige Araki is trapped inside his besieged castle when mysterious crimes start tearing his court apart from within. With Nobunaga Oda’s forces coming closer, Murashige turns to imprisoned strategist Kanbei Kuroda, leading to an unlikely alliance. Can they expose the traitor before everything goes down?
Kiyoshi Kurosawa enters the realm of the samurai for the very first time with this magnificent historical mystery, adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s acclaimed novel. A hit at Cannes, The Samurai and the Prisoner transforms a besieged castle into an intricate chamber of suspicion, political intrigue, and murder, with Masahiro Motoki’s troubled lord and Masaki Suda’s brilliant strategist taking centre stage. Kurosawa’s elegant framing and fascination with faith and loaded spaces underpin this absorbing, beautiful examination of a ruler’s duty towards his subjects. A modern genre master playing with the possibilities of an entirely new cinematic tradition – what a treat!
