A Samurai in Time

If a year is sometimes defined by a thing, 2025 for me would be the year of being crap at going to the cinema. Not for lack of booking tickets but cometh the moment cometh feeling dreadful, missing film after film. One of which was my ticket, showing as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme, for another small budget big success feature courtesy of Third Window: A Samurai in Time. 

True, Third Window had as always kindly sent me their screener but it sat unwatched. The stress of moving home didn’t help me get into the frame of mind to watch it, but I think a good chunk of why I put it off was the age-old problem of the film that is hyped and the dread of not wanting to be disappointed. OK, it’s silly but it’s real. Sometimes you need space and also the right time to watch a film, the right time for A Samurai in Time.  

Low-level Shogunate samurai, Kosaka (Makiya Yamaguchi), and his clansman are sent to kill a rebel samurai. Struck by lightning during his duel with the rebel, Kosaka awakens to find himself in the strangest of places: the future! And stranger still: a film set. Through the kindness of assistant director, Yuko (Yuno Sakura) and others, Kosaka finds himself acting as a jidaigeki extra, there to be slashed and killed by the star, in episode after episode... 

A Samurai in Time fits into the same category of film as John Sayle’s The Brother from Another Planet and even, arguably, Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby, where a person finds themselves somewhere utterly alien and adjusting to it, finding a way to navigate the situation based on an essential gentleness, kindness and a sense of shared humanity, no matter whatever the past of the protagonist may be or even however the people they meet assume their mental state to be. It’s an essential part of the film and one that it needs to address and make convincing or fail utterly. If we do not believe what is happening the two-hours and eleven-minutes of the film will feel like agony: a tortured, ruined concept that is one long yawn-inducing eye-roll. Like the films previously mentioned, A Samurai in Time works because it constructs a world of generosity and kindness while existing in reality. The simplest of things, such as needing a place to live, is resolved because a Buddhist priest (Yoshiharu Fukuda) takes Kosaka in, but the why of it matters: the temple is around the corner from the jidaigeki studio and they use the temple frequently to shoot external scenes; Kosaka is found asleep and assumed to be in costume and is totally in thrall to his part, by the priest, and there’s a respect for his art and also an understanding that the man has assumed amnesia (helped by a clonk on the noggin Kosaka takes earlier). There is the obvious: a samurai being a samurai extra is a natural fit, but nevertheless the film needs to set it up and it neatly slots together elements and characters so that they fit snugly together. But mostly it’s that sense of warm humanity that the film exudes that is so necessary because it ensures there is no superfluous sentimentality – if anything our protagonist will grapple with his past even in this future, in ways that at first we might not expect. 

Kosaka, too, is an underdog, as is Yuko the hard-working AD. This is true of the other extras too, who are there to die, as is the jidaigeki which is now an underdog genre and on the way out: gone are the days of studios being filled with their production.  So there is a sense of nostalgia for the past but also a need to understand it, both in terms of film and also Japan’s history. The film weaves these themes together skillfully, sometimes taking us in directions we might not initially expect. A Samurai in Time is really built around Kosaka, almost to the point where you could argue the undisclosed object of his affection, Yuko, is by comparison a bit underdeveloped - though part of this may be because the actor playing Yuko, due to budget constraints, was working as the AD on the film itself, as well as within the film. As the lead, Makiya Yamaguchi has a kind of hangdog charm and as he moves from a samurai to a samurai out of time, subtly adjusting to the world, suddenly dressed in t-shirt and jeans, you're able to believe in his character because there is an essential respectful earnestness to Kosaka that no matter how he might dress, he is at heart the same samurai we met in the first scene. He tends, too, to draw out the best in others (with the exception of one specific scene, which is perhaps the only one I’d have removed from the film), whether the priest welcoming him into his house, Sekimoto (Rantaro Mine) the stunt coordinator, Yuko or the other ready-to-be-slashed extras. The film hangs off Yamaguchi gently; in many ways the film glides around him, allowing its humour to rarely try to work for laughs, mainly not trying to be too obtrusive and the director, Junichi Yasuda, does his work better for not trying too hard. Often the music provides the comedic beats; he only occasionally cuts suddenly forward to provide impact, instead he shapes the film so that it seems to flow naturally, which in a film over 2-hours long is quite important. Pacing or even ideas can become uneven or patchy, but the film never feels like it’s going to misstep (even if the scene with the teenagers I’d have cut, being the one pat moment in the film). 

In many ways Junichi Yasuda’s film is the classic type of not-a-lot-actually-happens film. There may be moments of character driven drama but it’s really about the flow of the film and the characters that weave in and out of its story; it’s about treating people with humanity, with looking to our history and maintaining it through change and yes, some parts of the story are not the most original (Yuko writing her never-finished screenplay being perhaps the most obvious) but because the film is so warm-hearted and Makiya Yamaguchi’s Kosaka performance is so engaging this never matters too much. The characters in the film are people you would want to know and be around; their quietly observed kindness is the sort of behaviour we’d like to think we’d be capable of and to find in those around us.  And of course it is a love letter to the Jidaigeki, to those that perform and shape its stories, and a reminder of the importance of the genre.