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黒牢城 ***½/**** starring Masahiro Motoki, Masaki Suda, Yuriko Yoshitaka written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, based on the novel by Honobu Yonezawa directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
by Angelo Muredda The obscure motive behind samurai Araki Murashige’s decision to abandon his besieged castle is the first puzzle of many for us to work through in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s pleasantly twisty The Samurai and the Prisoner. Adapted from the prize-winning 2021 novel by Honobu Yonezawa, the film marks a number of firsts for the master of modern urban alienation, despite the familiar hook of an unsolved mystery. The dense, knotty text finds Kurosawa transplanting something of the creeping gloom of works like Charisma and Pulse onto a period drama that is atypically centred not on humble citizens like low-level yakuza (Serpent’s Path), factory workers (Bright Future), or police officers (Cure and Retribution), but on real historical figures of power and consequence. Though it’s as stately and poised as his contemporary work, Kurosawa’s rare period piece is also an uncharacteristically loquacious affair for him, successfully splitting the difference between a traditional jidaigeki–a dialogue-heavy costume drama set in feudal Japan–and a season of “Columbo”, complete with talking killers and shrewd detectives playing dumb to solicit confessions.
Working backwards from the historical enigma laid out in opening title cards informing us that the protagonist’s eventual defection of his post “remains a mystery to this day,” the film picks up with Lord Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) ten months earlier in 1578, in the days following his revolt against the warlord Oda Nobunaga (spoken of but left offscreen), whose forces now surround Arioka Castle, which Murashige uneasily protects. When Oda’s envoy, Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda), entreats Murashige to acknowledge his unenviable position and surrender, Murashige imprisons him in the dungeon despite his pleas that he be killed in combat, lest Oda take his disappearance as a sign of his defection and punish his family for it. Rather than casting his merciful rule against the capricious violence of Oda as intended, Murashige’s ostensibly principled nonviolent stance, and the corruption of the samurai code that accompanies his pridefulness in asserting his will to pacifism over Kanbei’s will to die with honour, seems to loose dark forces within the castle walls, unsettling even his home in the form of the growing distance between Murashige and his wife, Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka).
These forces find their cryptic expression in the four chapters to follow, which see Kurosawa, one of the great living horror filmmakers, who possesses a preternatural knack for realistic procedurals where evil leaches into the ground, on more well-trodden territory. Murashige’s actions appear to spawn a succession of bad omens, one per season, demoralizing the lord and his retainers while they wait for either salvation from their distant reinforcements or death from Oda. Every enigmatic sign makes the lord play makeshift detective, working to solve seemingly unsolvable crimes, lest his men feel they are being divinely punished for his idiosyncratic leadership. In the first section, set in winter, the film takes the form of a traditional locked-door mystery, with Murashige getting to the bottom of how a child prisoner ended up dead within his cell, the murder weapon vanishing before the body is found. In spring, he’s presented with a more abstract puzzle, as the samurai practice of claiming the head of a rival general defeated in battle is subverted when one conquered foe’s head is mysteriously swapped with another’s after a skirmish. Things become more ominous still in the summer, when Murashige is tasked with explaining how a Buddhist priest he’s sent off into town with a message is found dead not long into the journey, with the likeliest culprit struck down by lightning before he can offer much in the way of evidence. Finally, in autumn, it falls to Murashige to gather these disparate cases and tease out once and for all whether their source is human or divine. Meanwhile, the wolf of Oda’s army comes ever closer to the door.
Though these episodes feature Murashige gathering evidence through interviews, forensic surveys of crime scenes, and note-taking as he would in a police procedural, the bulk of his investigative work plays out in thrilling dialectical conversations between the title characters–rather like in the novels of Thomas Harris, where Will Graham and Clarice Starling find their man by consulting their psychopathic touchstone, serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Reminiscent of the apprehensive dance between Kōji Hashimoto’s detective and Masato Hagiwara’s somnambulant stranger in Cure, each chapter’s central question is resolved through a tense and prickly two-hander between Murashige and Kanbei, a cunning military strategist whose insights and acumen at solving riddles prove invaluable, even as his own motivations–to trick his host into killing him for the sake of his legacy? To make himself useful in the dungeon? To bring down the castle from within?–remain essentially unknowable. Suda, who brought an appropriately aloof air to his amoral third-party reseller protagonist in Kurosawa’s recent Cloud, invests Kanbei with an inscrutable intelligence that makes the central relationship work. The chatty and philosophical Murashige and the withholding Kanbei are an engaging odd couple. Suda’s ambivalent performance, itself a play for both the spectator as well as his character’s jailer, is slippery enough that one can never reasonably guess whether he’s fulfilling his own hunger to be listened to in tandem with Murashige’s desire to talk to an intellectual equal, or orchestrating the whole thing from the dungeon, a marvellously realized space comprising a central pillar surrounded by earth and sand that increasingly feels like the poisoned root of the castle.
Ultimately, as fun as it is to play sleuth alongside them, the film’s most absorbing conundrum lies not in the concrete casework the men decode together, but in the abstract question surrounding Murashige’s leadership and its end. Is it, after all, truly more violent to kill one’s enemies in combat than it is to effectively turn them into one’s intellectual playthings, repurposed to serve one’s need for companionship and debate? Chiyoho’s traumatic memory of living through a prior city siege where the generals told their rank-and-file soldiers and citizenry that one must either advance to paradise or retreat to Hell–a Buddhist dictum she comes to doubt, in turn planting the seed of abdication in her husband’s mind–becomes another problem for Murashige and the viewer to turn over, this time without Kanbei’s help. A fascinating accidental companion piece to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which posits the trick of Odysseus’s use of the Trojan Horse as a betrayal of the golden rule that enables the fall of Bronze Age civilization as its inhabitants know it, The Samurai and the Prisoner is a no less ambitious and arguably more intellectually rewarding meditation on the mysteries of power, consequence, and accountability.
