Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns with a stunning-looking period mystery thriller, The Samurai And The Prisoner. Here’s the trailer: The Samurai And The Prisoner immediately went on our must-watch list when we first heard about it earlier this year. Not just because it’s from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa – the director of such genre masterpieces as ... The Samurai And The Prisoner trailer | Period thriller from the director of Pulse looks stunning
Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns with a stunning-looking period mystery thriller, The Samurai And The Prisoner. Here’s the trailer:
The Samurai And The Prisoner immediately went on our must-watch list when we first heard about it earlier this year. Not just because it’s from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa – the director of such genre masterpieces as Cure, Pulse and Creepy – but also because of its captivating premise.
It’s a period piece set in feudal Japan, but it’s an interior, tense-sounding thriller rather than a war epic. It takes place inside a warlord’s heavily defended castle, where a series of murders leave Lord Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) paranoid and desperate to find the culprit. To catch the killer, he turns to a prisoner he has locked up in his dungeon (Masaki Suda).
Based on the novel by Honobu Yonezawa, the adaptation has received some hugely positive reviews from Cannes, with Brian Tallerico giving it five stars over at Roger Ebert dot com. It’s a “masterful drama about some pretty existentially horrifying things, including divine punishment, beheadings, multiple murders, and the belief that an honorable death in this life leads to salvation in the next,” he wrote.
Sounds corking. But then again, Kurosawa has spent the past 40 years or so making fabulous genre films. Cure and Pulse are perhaps his best known in the west, but his 2016 thriller Creepy is also darkly suspenseful, as was 2024”s Cloud.
Kurosawa also directed Sweet Home – a 1989 haunted house horror which was later adapted into a videogame of the same name by Capcom. It later served as the jumping-off point for what became the Resident Evil franchise. So there we go: as well as being a brilliant filmmaker, Kurosawa was indirectly responsible for the survival horror videogame genre, and in turn accidentally kept director Paul WS Anderson in gainful employment for about 15 years.
The Samurai And The Prisoner is in US cinemas from the 31st July. We’ll let you know when we hear of a UK release.
