Rent Kagemusha (1980)

Sumptuous camera work - Kagemusha review by RG

- but the subtitles were rubbish, amd I don’t speak Japanese.  Pity, because the story is a good one, and Kurasawa’s work is legendary.

Kagemusha - Kagemusha review by CP Customer

I'll begin this by saying I agree with the above, though Ran is one of my favourite Kurosawa movies (and I love kurosawas 50's/60's work too), and I also love Dersu Uzala, I think this one lacks a lot for me, you don't really connect with any of the characters like you would in other Kurosawa films, I'm thinking like in Red Beard, Seven Samurai, Ikiru and the other 2 I mentioned. Nakadai is a brilliant actor though so he deserves special mention, I just think like many other reviews have said on the internet this was more of a stepping stone to Ran, it's worth a watch especially for Kurosawa fans like me, but it does begin to feel long winded, today I rewatched an hour of it and it was already feeling lacklustre, I gave it 3* though as it has it's moments, and an intriguing storyline, though it lacks interesting characters and interesting dialogue like many other Kurosawas films.

The Mask Starts to Fit - Kagemusha review by griggs

Most samurai epics arrive with plenty of noise — battles, speeches, the whole lot. What caught me off guard about Kagemusha is how quiet and watchful it feels instead. The setup is simple: a petty thief who happens to look exactly like a powerful warlord. But the film quickly becomes less about politics and more about the strange feeling of someone slowly slipping into a role that isn’t really theirs.

I found the court scenes oddly tense. The stand-in barely speaks — one wrong word could ruin everything — so most of the drama plays out in posture, silence and sideways glances. Kurosawa stages these moments almost like theatre: still figures, careful gestures, everyone politely acting as if the performance is real.

There’s a tiny moment early on that really stuck with me. The thief instinctively sits like the warlord he’s imitating — upright, chin raised, gaze steady — and the room seems to pause.

From there, the film becomes less about spectacle and more about the eerie pull of a role that starts to feel a little too real.