Écran Large is back on the Croisette for the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. And it’s time to revisit The Castle of Arioka, the stunning period piece by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Cloud).
In the editorial room, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is among those bedside filmmakers who have scarred us, especially with Cure and Kairo. The Japanese director impressed us again in 2025 with a trio of successive films, including the brilliantly unsettling Chime.
If, in France, he’s best known for his horror offerings, he has dabbled in every genre, including period cinema. With The Castle of Arioka, shown in the Cannes Première section, he playfully stages samurai within an internal war, delivering a surprising siege-and-investigation narrative.
Drawn Katanas
What’s it about? In feudal Japan, Lord Murashige takes refuge in his castle and imprisons his foe, the strategist Kanbei, whom he decides to spare. As the seasons pass, unexplained crimes begin to disturb the regime of the place; Murashige leads the inquiry, yet every time a piece is missing that only Kanbei, from his cell, seems capable of deciphering.
And is it any good? Technically it sits in the chanbara genre (the Japanese samurai film), but The Castle of Arioka plays with its codes and imagery. With the exception of a battle scene whose wide shots, long lens, and vividly colored armies evoke Ran by Kurosawa (the other Akira), this adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s novel The Samurai and the Prisoner conjures an almost anti-cinematic stillness.
There’s even a hint of defiance. Far from the quick, sharp gestures of the katanas, the film seeks to extend its takes as long as possible, winding through the castle’s set with Lord Murashige (Masahiro Motoki, regal). From the opening minutes, the samurai’s movement through space is constantly interrupted by the reverences and the briefings of his subjects. The flow is impossible, and it becomes so when mysterious murders impose another form of stillness on the narrative, even as the four seasons unfold.
This episodic and relatively repetitive construct may unsettled some, but Kiyoshi Kurosawa imposes his own tempo. The elegance of his shot compositions gradually builds a different kind of mental combat—one fought as much with dialogue as with image—so that the filmmaker trains our eye to read power dynamics that are written almost entirely by the placement of bodies within this space transformed into a theatre.
Là encore, la donnée « Agatha Christie » est contrecarrée par le réalisateur, puisque Kanbei (Masaki Suda) se contente de rapports depuis sa cellule pour analyser les crimes improbables qui charpentent la narration. Tout le monde sait qu’une tragédie est en train de s’écrire, et pourtant, il y a des protocoles à respecter. Qu’il s’attarde sur la précision d’une cérémonie de thé ou sur des conseils militaires, The Castle of Arioka est tout entier dédié aux obligations pompeuses de ses protagonistes, enfermés dans des pulsions de mort que suppose le code d’honneur des samouraïs.
Or, Murashige devient au long des quatre chapitres un merveilleux héros anachronique, seigneur tendre et compréhensif qui refuse de faire couler le sang pour des guerres d’ego sans queue ni tête. En cours de route, il en vient même à s’effacer, pas tellement au profit de Kanbei, mais de sa femme Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka), contrepoint féministe et salvateur face à ces élans de violence vaine.
« If a warrior does not kill in times of war, he will suffer,” assène un personnage à Murashige comme une fatalité ancrée dans son époque. Kiyoshi Kurosawa en tire une nouvelle fois une marche programmée et sublime, hantée par la mort. Même lorsqu’il s’attaque à un projet éloigné de ses classiques de l’horreur, il garde toujours dans ses images cette évanescence mortifère, cette invisible et inquiétante étrangeté qui hérissaient les poils dans Cure ou Chime.
Ça sort quand ? Prochainement, grâce à Art House.
