Kiyoshi Kurosawa used to want to scare us. Now he plays a longer game, fascinated by power

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Set us as preferred To know Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work is to feel his love for danger.Inexplicable malevolence, dread-filled moods and worrisome behavior haunt his genre-speckled oeuvre, from 1997’s unnerving serial-killer freak-out “Cure” through his vengeance-fueled internet cautionary tale “Cloud” from two years ago.“What makes for good movies is a plot driven forward progressively through things that actively happen,” the 71-year-old director says recently over Zoom from his home in Tokyo, using a translator.

“Audiences need to be drawn to this idea of: What will happen next?”His fans don’t necessarily get an explanation for the unease Kurosawa sometimes generates, but it’s part of the draw.That mindset has made him a horror maestro for over three decades.

Outside that genre, he enjoys a reputation for being an acutely psychological chronicler of contemporary anxieties, as in his award-winning 2008 drama of job loss and family secrets, “Tokyo Sonata.” Now, though, Kurosawa has not only made his first film set prior to Japan’s modernizing Meiji era — a category of feudal period dramas known as jidaigeki — but an old-fashioned murder mystery to boot, complete with solutions to satisfy the most die-hard Agatha Christie reader.“The Samurai and the Prisoner,” which Kurosawa adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s acclaimed 2021 novel (it recently premiered at Cannes), unfolds during the fractured Sengoku period in the 16th century, the same era as one of his favorite jidaigekis, “Throne of Blood,” directed by his unrelated namesake, Akira Kurosawa.In a besieged mountainside castle, rebellious Lord Murashige (Masahiro Motoki), trying to consolidate disparate clans of warriors, engages in a battle of wills with his nemesis’ emissary, Kanbei (Masaki Suda), whom he’s imprison...