The latest Kiyoshi Kurosawa picture is a period piece, set during a military coup in 16th Century feudal Japan. For a director who’s best known for making low-budget genre exercises that inevitably climax with sparsely populated warehouse shootouts (Cure, Cloud, Doppelganger, etc.), that setting suggests a substantial escalation in scale of production. The sprawling cast of period-costumed actors alone presumes a larger budget than what Kurosawa usually works with, even if those actors spend most of the runtime talking in rooms instead of actively waging war on the battlefield. The Samurai and the Prisoner is a rare instance where it’s justified to mention Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s name in the same breath as Akira Kurosawa’s, whereas they’re usually only grouped together by mistake (like how Paul Haggis’s 2004 film Crash is frequently referenced in error while attempting to cite the 1996 Cronenberg classic of the same name). Here, Kurosawa courts the comparison, working in the same samurai warfare genre his elder filmsman mastered long ago in titles like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Throne of Blood. Once the audience adjusts expectations for what the phrase “a Kurosawa film” usually conjures, though, the payoffs are just as slyly playful & sinister as the low-budget, high-concept thrillers that have gradually made him a cinephilic favorite.

Masahiro Motoki stars as an unusually merciful lord turned self-appointed general, leading a small rebellion against a monstrously bloodthirsty warmonger who constantly threatens to invade the castle where his men take refuge. During his slow-moving political maneuvers to join forces with other rebellions against the villainous warlord, the uneasy general’s men quietly undermine his power, mostly in response to his moralistic refusal to behead prisoners of war in accordance to samurai custom. The more prisoners he holds hostage or sets free—heads attached to necks—the worse morale becomes, leading to a series of mysterious murders on castle grounds. In addition to his new duties as a general, Motoki finds himself playing detective to these puzzling crimes, which each include a seemingly supernatural element that shields those responsible from suspicion: a strike of lightning, an invisible arrow, a disappearing tea urn, and the contorted face of a severed head. To help solve these mysteries, he privately enlists the counsel of his wife (Yuriko Yosthitaka) and his most intelligent prisoner (Masaki Suda), who both offer great insights into the logistics of each crime and expose great vulnerabilities within the man struggling to keep his dwindling militia alive.

If there’s any easy, contemporary comparison for The Samurai and the Prisoner to be found outside either of the Kurosawas’ filmographies, it’s in the recent Chinese murder mystery Full River Red, directed by Crouching Tiger‘s Zhang Yimou. In Full River Red, the mystery of a traveling diplomat’s murder within a guarded military compound leads to a series of shadowy political double-crossings while the walls close in on the warrior-detectives chasing down clues. Both films sidestep the expected excitement of onscreen bloodshed to instead tell their stories of violent political intrigue as high-style stage plays. Whereas Zhang’s film ultimately comes across as a nationally propagandistic hip-hop music video, however, Kurosawa’s aims are much more coldly philosophical, as is typical of his work. The climactic reveal of how these faux-supernatural murder mysteries are connected is chilling, with grander implications about how the selfish desires & revenges of human beings are often hidden behind the religious justification of “divine punishment.” There’s also a hypocritical tension throughout in the differing morality of individual murders vs. battlefield slayings, which weighs heavily enough on the titular samurai’s conscience that he starts to question whether truly honorable warfare is either possible or worthwhile. As always, Kurosawa has a lot on his mind, and he expresses those large ideas through the smallest of gestures. The major deviations from his usual tactics here are all trivial matters of genre, scale, setting, and costuming.

-Brandon Ledet