RAN (1985)

Four soldiers survey their landscape from horseback, arrows drawn, each facing in his own direction. Behind them, the sky is painted with clouds, seeming almost to grow from the green land below, the sound of grass rustling in the gentle, altitudinous winds. Mountains behind them seem to fall away to some precipice below—we appear to be amongst the heavens.

We’ve been looking at a still frame, but this only registers once the frame begins to move. The horses raise their heads, the soldiers following suit. The grass sways, the clouds inch along. It is history un-paused, soldiers stirring to life as might the subjects of a painting when we look for long enough, when the brushstrokes seem to create movement of their own. We are in medieval Japan; the soldiers are on a hunt for wild boar.

Stillness and movement are essential elements in Ran / 乱, as integral to its hypnotic effect as light or sound. This is true for director Akira Kurosawa’s filmography at large, but especially so in regards to the director’s later period (he was 75 years old when he directed Ran). The film’s opening 20 minutes are placid, almost serene. The soldiers move silently, but when they charge, it’s as if part of the landscape itself has broken free. The sound of horses galloping, animals rush through long grass, arrows sail through the air, then all is still once again.

The ageing warlord, Lord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) watches over his soldiers with calm power. He sits in the shade of the branches that a soldier has chopped down by sword and driven into the ground beside him. He wears ornate gowns of silken whites and golds, while his white shock of hair and beard make him look as if he’s just seen a ghost.

The make-up, darkening his under-eyes to a hollow, and his cheeks to a pale white, suggest that maybe he’s the ghost, haunting the mountains and the land where so much blood has been spilt in his name. His expression, like a Japanese Noh mask, seems to register centuries of horror and death that have passed like a shadow before him.

Perhaps no director made such a successful leap from black and white to colour as Kurosawa, and here Hidetora and his men are filmed against regal yellows and golds, suggesting a prosperity that is artificial when contrasted with the verdant greens and blues of the land they have seized. Lord Hidetora, aware of his advancing age, announces that he intends to divide his kingdom up between his three sons, Jiro, Taro and Saburo. The eldest son, Taro (Akira Terao), will be the de facto leader and take possession of the coveted ‘First Castle’, while Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu) and Saburo will be given the second and third castles. Hidetora naively speaks of peace. “Our houses should be united,” he claims.

Saburo (Daisuke Ryu) rebukes his father’s plan, risking his position to claim that he’s making a foolish mistake. A loyal servant, Hirayami Tango (Masayuki Yui) agrees with Saburo—Hidetora will be leaving himself vulnerable to attack with this exchange of power. Hidetora rashly mistakes their concerns for insolence, and both men are exiled, Hidetora’s kingdom to be divided between Taro and Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu), with Hidetora himself retaining the title of ‘Great Lord’.

The film’s opening 20-minute passage is the work of a maestro with seemingly nothing left to prove. As a result, Ran is afforded a kind of deceptive ease—everything pictured seems like an organic confluence of lives and environments, an epic downfall that could not be held off, a cosmic fate impossible to outrun. Kurosawa lets time pass, allows us to sit with these men and their decisions. We feel hours slipping through the ageing Lord’s fingers.

The sense of time and space granted to scenes like this may be a result of Kurosawa’s directorial methods: he would rehearse single shots for hours upon hours, before attempting to capture scenes in just one take. The rehearsals were the backup. He would hand-paint storyboards, and shot key scenes with three different cameras, each capturing a different angle. Ran existed fully realised in his mind before sets were even built.

That deceptive ease, those soul-stirring images appearing so suddenly and without pretension, was in actuality rehearsed down to the smallest gesture. Rather than constriction, it offers a miraculous freedom to the actors and the action. There’s a sense of scope, a multitude of possibilities, most of which involve defiance, revolt, assassination, or declarations of war. We feel the strain of Hidetora to control the elements of his kingdom, just as Kurosawa as a director had spent the previous 40 years harnessing everything from the weather to the colour of the sky in order to create enduring film images.

Ran, then, is about a man recognising that the sunlight is waning on his reign, the twilight hours setting in, his kingdom soon to roll into the uncertain shadows of night. Kurosawa was to direct three further feature films after Ran, but this was his final historical epic, and considered by many to be his final masterpiece. Is Kurosawa looking back, just as Hidetora is, and assessing the worth of it all? Hidetora’s rule was brutally violent, and the film’s depiction of battle and blood pulls no punches.

As Saburo’s calamitous predictions come to fruition, battles wage, castles are burnt and villagers are slaughtered. The political manoeuvres of Jiro and Taro drive their father to exile and madness, as he considers the life he has led, the death he has wrought. Corpses lay in divine golden light but there’s always a darkness on the outskirts waiting to close in, like a Caravaggio painting, as if the dead are giving out the last few flickers of light.

Kurosawa abhorred blood and violence, but held the belief that the horrors of our world must be faced head-on. Though influenced by tales from the brutal, Civil War-torn Sengoku period in Japan’s history, Kurosawa soon discovered the parallels between his developing tale and Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear. Violence, betrayal and a crumbling dynasty are present in Ran and King Lear, but the fact that Ran started life entirely separate from Shakespeare’s play only highlights the fact that history repeats itself, that seeds of destruction can be sown on opposite sides of the earth, that we will seemingly always be drawn back to our own destruction, however the path towards it may look.

Hidetora has nightmares of engulfing voids, and wanders volcanic wastelands in a sort of fugue state. He has no wisdom to offer, only despair. In one scene, he stands with his back to a setting sun, facing towards our view as in a soliloquy. “Buddha has gone from this evil world,” he states. “We can’t rely on his mercy.” Hidetora recognises the mercilessness in the sons upon whom he has bestowed his kingdom, understands that with each succeeding reign there will only be more violence. Like the Samurai Shimada in Seven Samurai (1954) who admits that years of fighting has left him empty, Hidetora is a husk of a warlord, haunting a world which he’s now too old and weak to change.

Yet, where Seven Samurai’s devastating treatise on violence and futility was punctuated by a sense of rollicking adventure, Ran is brutal and abrupt. Toru Takemitsu’s sorrowful score–wailing strings, mournful woodwinds—is for some stretches the only sound we hear as battle ensues. There’s always a sense of movement, of life and mayhem rushing past, feet stampeding and hooves trampling earth and blood underfoot. Kurosawa and his team of cinematographers (Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda and Asakazu Nakai) achieve a sense of observant calm, almost zen (but never detachment) as the world burns before us. We seem to be watching history unfold, and are helpless to stop it.

Did Kurosawa here remember a feeling of helplessness and despair from his own childhood? In 1923, when he was just 13, Kurosawa was taken by his older brother Heigo to survey the fallout of the Great Kantō Earthquake and the ensuing Kantō massacre, a barbaric slaughter of six thousand Koreans, Chinese people mistaken as Koreans, and Japanese socialists and communists, authorised by Japanese authorities who spread the idea that the Koreans were somehow responsible for the earthquake.

The young Kurosawa witnessed death and destruction beyond measure. Mutilated humans and animals, cities torn apart, and seemingly nobody there to stop it. Kurosawa claims that he tried to look away; his brother insisted that he keep his eyes fixed on the truths of what had happened. The sins of a nation’s past, as well as the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction from afar, inform Ran’s sense of unease—the film was made only 40 years after Hiroshima, and it seems to live in the long-cast nuclear shadow of that atrocity. Overwhelmingly, the film possesses a war fatigue—the exhausted terror of being attacked, and the helpless sorrow of what one might do in retaliation.

Yet, Hidetora is responsible. He’s not just a watchful observer, but a man who has brought cruelty and fear to a beautiful land, a man with hands stained in centuries of blood. His eldest son, Taro, is married to Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada), one of the only survivors of a massacre perpetrated upon her family by Hidetora. Her face is white and angular, eyebrows painted high in a constant state of horror. “Right there my mother took her own life,” she tells Taro. She has lost everything to war, and now she’s back in the castle in which she was born, married to the son of the man that killed her family.

The political manipulations, the murder plots, the power-grabs of despots, play out with increasing fruitlessness. Lady Kaede, Taro and Jiro each have their own intentions, but they require a participant who’s no longer able to function. Hidetora’s wanderings through the lands, accompanied only by his loyal jester, Kyoami (Peter), aren’t a test but a punishment, Kurosawa here treating landscapes like a great purgatory—perhaps the void that he had witnessed in his nightmares.

Kyoami is the only one permitted to speak the truth. Beholding his cowering Lord, he states, “You shelter in the very ruins of the castle you burnt. Ignorance is bliss, indeed.” If Ran considers the process of stripping back layers of ignorance, then perhaps no moment is as haunting as when we meet Tsurumaru (Mansai Nomura), a young man whose eyes were gouged out in childhood by Hidetora’s men. He has been living in poverty and darkness since. There’s no more looking away from what he has done, and it is now impossible for Hidetora, aged and weak, to stop the march of death that he began, and which his sons now continue.

However, for all Ran’s psychological depth, for all the complexities of the questions it asks, it remains an experiential film. It’s earthly, a film of stunning detail; the river’s water sent exploding underfoot, smoke billowing from castles and mixing with the mist from the mountains. The evils are committed as an impartial world watches, unable to influence the actions of man. Clouds drift, the world endures and offers its bounty. There’s no other way to feel but incredulous when otherworldly beauty exists alongside enduring terrestrial horror.

If it feels uncanny to watch Ran in 2025, then we cannot discount the fact that we each live with the knowledge that genocides are currently happening in our world, enacted by the power-mad and seemingly unstoppable by helpless onlookers. Even if our real-world dictators experienced a dark night of the soul, what would it change? It is this question, perhaps, that makes Ran so terrifying, so difficult to parse, especially in a world in which we look to the wise for solutions: with Ran, Kurosawa suggests it may already be too late to stop the march of death.

JAPAN • FRANCE | 1985 | 162 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | JAPANESE

40th Anniversary Collector’s Edition 4K Ultra HD Special Features:

This 4K remaster of Ran includes Dolby Vision and HDR10, and is quite simply one of the most astonishing films I’ve ever seen on a home format. The colour gamut is very wide, and while the bold primary colours—greens, blues, and reds—are dazzling, the blacks are just as deep, and interior scenes are just as rich and full of detail. The costuming is of particular note, and with an image so sharp it is possible to observe even the smallest details. Though it is the same 4K transfer from 2015, it hardly needs updating. I watched the film with the original lossless Japanese audio, and throughout it sounds crystal clear and full of depth. Dialogue is sharp, and the sound effects during battle scenes are of particular power. Perhaps what stands out most is the film’s score, which takes centre stage in the mix and packs incredible power.

• A.K—a feature-length documentary on Akira Kurosawa by Chris Marker. This documentary from 1985 is a fascinating, feature-length look at Kurosawa during the making of Ran. There’s plenty of on-set footage, including shots of Kurosawa giving directions, and the beautifully anachronistic shots of 1980s markers (cars and lorries, walkie-talkies, wind-cheaters) amongst the samurai. It offers tremendous insight into just how calm and respectful Kurosawa’s sets were—the crew called him ‘Sensei’, and Marker points out that he’s one of the most esteemed directors who ‘refuses to run things on fear’.
• Akira Kurosawa: The Epic and the Intimate. This is an archival documentary from the vault. It covers some of the same ground as A.K, and it does feel a bit dated now. It is a shame that ultimately this set doesn’t have more newly-commissioned extras, but this is still very interesting.
• Akira Kurosawa by Catherine Cadou. Another archival feature, this is a piece just under 15 minutes that sees Catherine Cadou speaking about the making of Ran, and the difficulties Kurosawa faced in getting the film funded—according to experts, Japan at the time was ‘terrified’ to fund a film by the maestro.
• Art of the Samurai. An interesting look at the art that influenced the film, and the Samurai’s depiction through art history.
• Interview with the Director of Photography Shoji Ueda.
• Interview with Michael Brooke, author and journalist.
• Interview with MS Meiko Harada.
• Stage appearance at the Tokyo International Film Festival 2015.
• The Samurai.

Cast & Crew

director: Akira Kurosawa.
writers: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni & Masato Ide (based on ‘King Lear’ by William Shakespeare).
starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu, Mieko Harada, Yoshiko Miyazaki, Mansai Nomura, Hisashi Igawa & Shinnosuke Ikehata.