Apologies in advance to Christopher Nolan, but the ensemble period epic we’re most looking forward to in July hails from Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The Samurai and the Prisoner—led by Masahiro Motoki, Masaki Suda, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Joe Odagiri, Munetaka Aoki, Ryota Miyadate, and Tasuku Emoto—premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and will begin a U.S. roll-out on July 31, with the director coming stateside. Ahead of its release, Janus Films has now debuted the new trailer and poster.
Here’s the synopsis: “When Lord Murashige rises up against the tyrannical Oda, he finds himself besieged within the walls of his own castle. Isolated, he is confronted with a series of mysterious crimes that shatter the fragile order of his court, plunging the fortress into fear and suspicion. With Oda’s army closing in and a traitor hiding among his ranks, Murashige is forced into an uneasy alliance with Kanbei, a brilliant and dangerous strategist held prisoner in the dungeon, as he must outwit his enemies and uncover the truth before time runs out.”
Leonardo Goi said in his Cannes review, “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.”
See the trailer and poster below:
