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Naman Ramachandran
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©YH/K/TSATP ©2026 “KOKUROJO” Film Partners Kurosawa Kiyoshi has spent a career trapping his characters in the present tense — in the buzzing infrastructure of contemporary Tokyo, in the ambient dread of the networked age, in the particular horror of ordinary life curdling into something much worse. “The Samurai and the Prisoner” takes him somewhere he has never been before: feudal Japan, Osaka circa 1578, a castle under siege.
The film, which bows in the Cannes Premiere section of the Cannes Film Festival, adapts Yonezawa Honobu’s Naoki Prize-winning novel about Lord Murashige Araki (Motoki Masahiro), a warlord who has risen against the ruthless Nobunaga Oda only to find himself hemmed in behind his own walls. As mysterious deaths begin to shatter the order of his court, he forges an uneasy alliance with Kanbei Kuroda (Suda Masaki), a brilliant strategist held prisoner in the dungeon below — a man who may, in fact, hold all the real power. Shot largely on the historical sets of Shochiku Studio and on location at temples and castles in Kyoto, the film is an uncommonly patient, architecturally precise work.
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