My Cultural Diet

A Samurai in Time begins as any good samurai movie should, with a duel, as Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi) prepares to cross katanas with a warrior from a rival clan. Fate, however, has something else in mind: a stray lightning bolt somehow sends Shinzaemon hundreds of years into the future, where he awakens on the set of a samurai TV series. Of course, he doesn’t realize it’s a set, and everyone else just assumes he’s an extra who wandered into the wrong production. Much of the ensuing humor stems from Shinzaemon trying to make sense of his strange new surroundings. But he eventually finds a new calling as an extra in jidaigeki titles, and specifically as a kirareyaku (i.e., an actor who specialize in dying on-screen). He even starts developing feelings for assistant director Yuko Yamamoto (Yuno Sakura), and becomes determined to help her film career succeed. But Shinzaemon can’t escape his past, and as the movie enters its final act, it becomes increasingly clear that the past isn’t through with him, either. A Samurai in Time is an obvious love-letter to the jidaigeki genre and as such, a clearly personal project for writer/director Jun’ichi Yasuda, who funded the film’s production with his own money. Thus, I do feel kind of bad for not liking it more than I did. A Samurai in Time is certainly charming and pleasant, and it’s easy to see why it became so successful thanks to word-of-mouth. (It would ultimately take the top prize at the 2025 Japan Academy Film Prize awards.) But it’s so pleasant that it occasionally becomes innocuous, even anodyne. While it’s occasionally a nice change of pace, the film’s exploration of the absurdity — and tragedy — of Shinzaemon’s plight lacks something vital to really bring it all home.

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