The Samurai

Film Review by Rachel Bowles | 06 Apr 2015
Film title: The Samurai
Director: Till Kleinert
Starring: Michel Dierks, Pit Bukowski
Release date: 13 Apr
Certificate: 18

Werewolf films tend to deal with the physical, and thus psycho-sexual, painful metamorphosis of a coming-of-age protagonist, from Ginger Snaps to Teen Wolf. Till Kleinert’s feature debut, The Samurai, is an intoxicatingly queer take on the werewolf motif, bending genre (gothic horror, fairytale, giallo, slasher, black comedy) as freely and expertly as gender.

Repressed policeman Jakob (Michel Dierks) patrols a provincial German village, feeding a wolf that’s bothering the locals, a parapraxis that summons the titular Samurai (Pit Burkowski). Burkowski is instantly iconic as the Samurai/werewolf: bestial and graceful, as beautiful as he is menacing, his wiry muscular body hirsute in a white gown, katana in hand. Jakob, at once Red Riding Hood, the Woodsman and a lone wolf, follows the Samurai into the woods. Doppelgangers, blood and gothic allusions abound; the film impressionistically unfurls into a lucid haze of sex and violence, compellingly offbeat and irrevocably Other. [Rachel Bowles]