While it is important to note that THE SAMURAI THAT NIGHT is a film of two halves, it is also imperative to know that the film is not a samurai film in the strictest sense. Directed by accomplished stage actor and director Masaaki Akahori, who derived the screenplay from one of his own plays, the film offers a distinct change of pace for the samurai subgenre, dragging it into a more contemporary climate. While his debut film is fuelled by one character’s pursuit of retribution, its

… a softly spoken and bashful ironworker who spends his days quaffing custard …

Masato Sakai plays Kenichi Nakamura, a softly spoken and bashful ironworker who spends his days quaffing custard and obsessing over a plot to finally avenge his wife, who was killed in a hit-and-run five years ago by the callous Kijima (Takayuki Yamada), a cartoonishly boorish thug uncaring of the rules of society. After serving a term in jail, the guilty and unsympathetic Kijima attempts to re-enter the community, though he begins to receive daily letters from an unknown sender, which count down the days until the anniversary of the incident, when he will be killed. As the day looms ever closer, Nakamura (the samurai of the title) refuses to listen to reason, biding his time until he can finally exact the justice that has corroded his life since his beloved wife’s death.

However, THE SAMURAI THAT NIGHT fails to deliver on the potential its premise begins to spell out in the opening section, which is a wobbly balance of peculiar humour and meditative character building. No matter how much Akahori builds up the tension, which comes to a head in an almost comically distressing collision between the two characters, his film is a meandering and long gestating melange of nuanced characters and repetitiveness, taking its unusual nature and running with it until it eventually flounders.