YNOT at the Movies

Two men in a dungeon, trading theories about a string of impossible murders, prove far more compelling than any battlefield could. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner (黒牢城 | Japan 2026 | in Japanese | 147 min.) is his first period film after five decades spent almost entirely in the present tense. That history matters, because the instinct that made him a master of contemporary dread hasn't left him: he's just pointed it at the 16th century.

Set in 1578, Lord Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) has rebelled against the tyrannical warlord Nobunaga Oda (Bando Shingo) and barricaded himself inside Arioka Castle. Oda's army surrounds the walls, but the more immediate threat comes from inside them: a string of killings nobody can explain, each one chipping away at what's left of Murashige's authority over his own court. Cut off from easy answers, he turns to Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda), a rival strategist he's holding prisoner in the dungeon. The alliance is transactional and wary, and increasingly the only thing keeping the castle from tearing itself apart.

Kurosawa stages almost all of it as conversation, often like detectives working a case in the present day. The two men talk through each death methodically, and the film builds its tension out of deduction rather than swordplay, closer to a locked-room mystery than a war picture. It's an unusual register for a story set against a siege, and it pays off: the scale of the war outside stays constant and looming while the actual drama narrows to two men working out who's lying to whom. Every space in the castle, dungeon included, is shot with the same spare, theatrical precision, so the mystery never feels smaller than the history surrounding it.

Motoki plays Murashige's unraveling with real control, a lord who starts the film certain of his own authority and ends it questioning nearly everything about it. Suda gets the showier part: Kanbei shifts registers from ally to threat within a single scene, and he's convincing in both directions, which is exactly what the role demands. Yuriko Yoshitaka, as Murashige's wife Chiyoho, has less screen time but delivers the film's most direct emotional beat late on. The film keeps circling back to an old Buddhist phrase, "advance to paradise, retreat into hell," which hangs over Murashige as a kind of warning against turning back. Chiyoho answers it herself near the end, telling him "there is paradise even for those who retreat," and it reframes everything he's been agonizing over.

At two and a half hours, this is a long sit, but the length works in the film's favor rather than against it. The drama keeps unfolding in small increments, one revelation stacked on the next, and the time passes without announcing itself.

There's a gravity to the whole thing that recalls watching a stage production of Shakespeare, actors working through a slow accumulation of betrayal in a single set rather than a movie padding itself out. It's an absorbing watch throughout, and it never loses its grip. Anyone who knows Kurosawa mainly through Cure (1997) will recognize the same patient unease here, just relocated four centuries back.

"The Samurai and the Prisoner" opens in theaters on Friday, July 31, 2026 in New York and Los Angeles, expanding to other cities in the following weeks, and at the Roxie theater on Friday, August 14, 2026.