Fantasia International Film Festival Review: ‘A Samurai in Time’ Brilliantly Reinvents Jidaigeki Cinema

It’s been some time since jidaigeki cinema made its way to our screens. What better way to reinvent the genre than with time travel splashed into the mix with Junichi Yasuda‘s A Samurai in Time, which had its international premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. Competing for the Cheval Noir award, Yasuda has created an effective jidaigeki that stays within the genre’s tropes while simultaneously subverting traditional time travel clichés for a deeply human and crowd-pleasing feature.

Beginning his film within Edo Japan, Samurai Kosaka Shinzameon (Maikya Yamaguchi) is in the heat of a duel as rain begins to pour down on him and lightning strikes his sword. He suddenly wakes up on the set of a jidaigeki television series in the present day. Of course, we get the usual ‘out of time’ bit, where Kosaka discovers television, technology, how a movie set operates, and new types of food that weren’t invented yet in Edo-era Japan.

All of this is funny but gets rather tiresome quickly. Thankfully, Yasuda has one more trick up his sleeve (that I won’t dare reveal), which shifts the film in a completely unexpected direction compared to the direction in which it was initially introduced. It then becomes the main conflict of A Samurai in Time, and instead of figuring out how to get back to his era, Kosaka begins to accept his newfound purpose inside the time he currently lives in and becomes a key player within the jidaigeki cinema industry.

That’s as far as I’ll describe the film because some true surprises keep the viewer on edge as the movie progresses. Yasuda had the opportunity to make an enjoyable but formulaic affair that checked every time travel trope in the box, attempting to have Kosaka going back to his period while learning more about how Japan has evolved through the short time he spent in our current era. But how many movies have we seen with that same plotline? It brings nothing new and gets less interesting as more films are made within that same throughline.

Yasuda successfully avoids all bad time travel clichés after the film’s first act. Once Kosaka is acclimated to the present, Yasuda never mentions time travel again but instead has fun with the potentiality of how a lightning strike can mess with space and time. That’s about as far as he can go because he knows the movie won’t be interesting if he stays within its time-travel portion. Rather, A Samurai in Time becomes a poignant meditation on how time comes for all of us, no matter how young or old we are.

In that regard, Yamaguchi more than succeeds in giving his portrayal of the film’s main samurai much-needed humanity. Yes, it’s funny whenever he discovers new elements that his era didn’t have, but it gets even more sincere and achingly beautiful as he realizes he’ll never return to the period he came from. One scene in particular, in which he reminisces about the time that once was, is the film’s best portion and couldn’t have been conveyed by an actor who didn’t represent the protagonist with so much emotional complexity on screen. This makes up for the lack of a compelling aesthetic, even if Yasuda frequently uses slow-motion and freeze-frames to elevate the tension in its well-choreographed action.

And while, yes, the fight scenes harken back to classic jidaigeki cinema, the too-clinical photography, unfortunately, hampers the emotional investment in its action scene and the world Yasuda builds up. The final fight, in particular, is terrifically staged, where the protagonist’s emotional journey runs at its highest, but is it compellingly shot? The jury’s still out, but the Fantasia audience ate this movie so much that the filmmaker and stars Yamaguchi and Yuno Sakura were deeply moved to tears after receiving a rapturous, almost two-minute-long, standing ovation once the credits finished rolling.

There’s no denying A Samurai in Time will play incredibly well with audiences. Yasuda knows that he has something special in his hands, not only as a love letter to the jidaigeki but also as a deeply heartfelt examination of what happens when time is taken away from you and how one begins to find oneself again once they realize there’s no going back. It’s an often moving character piece that is frequently hilarious and will have you on the edge of your seat as Yasuda smartly subverts tired tropes and elevates them to new, exciting heights. To me, that’s the best type of genre cinema there is, and here’s hoping the film will find a bigger audience than the Fantasia crowd (and from the sounds of the audience during the movie, it definitely will).

SCORE: ★★★