Lord Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) doesn’t like killing. A samurai presiding over Arioka Castle in 16th-century Japan, he’s a walking contradiction—a warrior bound by a merciless code of conduct he has no trouble forsaking, much to the dismay of his own court. All through Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first jidaigeki, he is summoned to execute people who’ve betrayed him, disobeyed his orders, or simply view death as the only means to save their honor. Every time, however, he pointedly refuses, trading murders for extended sojourns inside Arioka’s cavernous prisons. The line between mercy and weakness is perilously thin, and his most faithful disciples must work overtime to spin those apparent acts of cowardice into the wise decisions of a man deserving his throne. “I cannot see into your heart,” Murashige’s wife tells him early on, baffled by his unorthodox clemency. Hell, does anyone?
Like its protagonist, The Samurai and the Prisoner is a curious oddity. It’s a film that keeps bloodletting to a bare minimum and delights in subverting genre expectations to fascinating effects. Where other recent entries in the canon opted for bigger, action-packed spectacles—recall Takeshi Kitano’s gruesome 2023 Kubi—this is a much more stately, almost contemplative affair, a kind of throwback to mid-century masterpieces from Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa. An adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s prize-winning novel of the same name, it is split into four chapters, each yoked to a distinct season. We begin in winter 1578, with Arioka under siege by Nobunaga Oda, the tyrannical despot Murashige used to serve, and with the capture of the titular prisoner, Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda, last seen playing an online scammer in Kurosawa’s 2025 Cloud), an envoy Oda had sent to the fortress on a diplomatic mission. The enemy’s forces are inching ever closer, but the looming attack doesn’t worry Murashige quite as much as the mysterious murder of eight-year-old Jinen, the son of a former ally who’s abandoned the warlord to side with Oda. The boy, too, had pleaded Murashige to kill him as a way to atone for his father’s defection, to no avail; when his body is found in one of Arioka’s chambers, Samurai suddenly turns into a court procedural, and its lead into a detective-cum-prosecutor prodding his retainers into confessing their misdeeds.
It is here that Kurosawa tips his hand. One way of interpreting the disorientation his saga accrues is that this film favors words over action—which isn’t to say it is uneventful, or that its script is excessively verbose. Samurai is largely powered by conversations, yet Kurosawa stages them as verbal sword battles. There is palpable electricity to the exchanges, none more flammable than those between Murashige and Kanbei, an astute strategist eventually enlisted to solve the child’s assassination—and the several other strange occurrences in this eminently strange film—from behind bars. And there is something growingly sinister about how Kurosawa immortalizes the locale. An indoor epic, Samurai mostly unfolds inside Arioka, where the real-life Murashige barricaded himself in 1578 after rising against his master. But Yasuyuki Sasaki, who’d previously lensed Cloud, turns the castle into something closer to a jail than a refuge, invoking a panopticon effect as his camera pans 360-degrees across the inner courtyard.
Kurosawa has long excelled at weaponizing offscreen space. His 21st-century ghost stories—haunted by ectoplasms and murderous entities patrolling cities as spectral as cemeteries—drew their terrifying power not just from what they showed but kept purposely hidden; the world that lies just outside his frames is always alive with an uncanny sense of danger. That technique here reaches an apotheosis. It’s not that Samurai is devoid of violence; it’s that this by and large takes place outside our view. Save for a late-night battle sequence, we mostly hear about Oda’s troops slaughtering their way toward Arioka, about enemies fallen at the front, about the heroic feats of Murashige’s subordinates. So much of Samurai comprises rumors that may or may not be true, depending on who you choose to believe, animating the paranoid energy that courses through it.
For a director best famed for his chilling allegories of our back-to-front digital lives, the starkly novel setting will likely lead conversations about Samurai towards an alleged departure from the rest of Kurosawa’s oeuvre. But Murashige’s struggle for emancipation from the ruthless bushido moral compass aligns him with the drifters populating works like Cure, Pulse, or Cloud—outcasts likewise hellbent on breaking free from their restrictive social orders, all rules be damned. Murashige spent his last years as a teaist, and in what’s possibly his most indelible sequence, Kurosawa captures him as he treats a few vassals to his special brew. With bated breath, they watch him pour it from one of his beloved urns, so entranced by the performance that it’s as if he’d ensorcelled them. Chances are you’ll leave the film just as hypnotized.
Samurai is the kind of work that feels designed to sidestep you, not just by virtue of its enigmatic protagonist, but as a result of its formal choices. Edited by longtime collaborator Koichi Takahashi, it moves in hiccups, with sudden cuts abruptly slingshotting you from one conspiracy to the next. Kurosawa matches gravity with absurdity, punctuating his characters’ psychological torments with gallows humor. This, too, is nothing novel, strictly speaking, nor is the distancing effect these tonal shifts can elicit. But the rewards for those unafraid to meet this film and submit to its confounding charms are immense. Kurosawa finds in Murashige a formidable analog; anchored as it may be to a rich, illustrious cinematic lineage, The Samurai and the Prisoner feels at once retro and rebellious—a loving tribute from one disruptor to another.
The Samurai and the Prisoner premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by Janus Films on July 31.