Film Review - The Modern Samurai

Michael J. Jacyna transforms the archetype of the wandering samurai into a contemporary meditation on violence, memory and moral obligation, using Los Angeles after dark as both battleground and emotional landscape.

The title The Modern Samurai suggests something far more literal than the film Michael J. Jacyna ultimately delivers.

There are no feudal castles here, no armies gathering beneath banners and no warrior riding into battle beneath a code visibly written for him. Instead, there is Los Angeles at night — glowing signs, empty streets, passing headlights and a solitary man attempting to maintain some kind of personal order in a world that increasingly appears to have abandoned the concept.

Jacyna is less interested in transplanting a samurai story into contemporary Los Angeles than he is in asking what the principles associated with that archetype might look like when stripped of history, ceremony and cultural structure. What remains when honor becomes personal rather than institutional? What does duty mean when no one has asked you to intervene?

The answer arrives through Arthur, played by Jacyna himself, whose encounter with a violent robbery sends him into pursuit across the city.

On paper, this is the foundation of a straightforward action short. In execution, however, The Modern Samurai operates closer to neo-noir than conventional crime cinema. The robbery functions as an inciting incident, but the real pursuit appears to be happening internally.

Arthur is carrying something long before he begins following anyone.

Memory.

The film gradually reveals the presence of Aoi, played by Mayu Yabuna, whose relationship to Arthur exists almost like an emotional echo running beneath the present action. Rather than stopping to explain that history through conventional exposition, Jacyna allows fragments of the past to enter the film in the same way unwanted memories often enter real life — suddenly, incompletely and without regard for whatever is happening in the present.

That gives the short an unexpectedly melancholic quality.

Arthur may be moving through Los Angeles with purpose, but he feels emotionally suspended between two worlds: the city around him and the life he remembers.

Jacyna’s performance reflects that division. Arthur speaks relatively little, and much of the character is communicated through stillness, observation and physical control. It is an appropriate choice for a film invoking the samurai archetype. Arthur’s identity seems built less around aggression than restraint.

When violence enters the story, it is not framed as spectacle.

Rather, it is consequence.

Cinematographer Marcel Benes, who also edited the film, makes particularly effective use of nighttime Los Angeles. The city becomes more than setting; it begins to resemble an emotional state. Streetlights dissolve into darkness. Cars pass without connection. Human beings briefly occupy the same spaces before disappearing again.

There is something inherently lonely about Jacyna’s Los Angeles.

The film understands that large cities can create a peculiar kind of isolation: millions of people living within physical proximity while remaining emotionally unreachable.

Arthur belongs perfectly to that landscape.

The visual approach often favors atmosphere over information, which aligns with Jacyna’s stated intention to build the film around emotional resonance rather than rigid narrative explanation. The result can occasionally feel deliberately elusive, but that ambiguity is largely productive. The movie does not appear interested in solving Arthur so much as allowing the viewer to inhabit him.

His moral code becomes the clearest thing about him. Witnessing violence creates an obligation. Whether anyone else believes that obligation exists hardly matters.

That is where the film’s samurai metaphor becomes most effective. Arthur does not become heroic because he knows how to fight. He becomes interesting because he appears incapable of simply walking away.

There is something almost anachronistic about that instinct. Modern urban life frequently encourages anonymity. Do not interfere. Do not become involved. Keep moving.

Arthur does the opposite.

And once he makes that choice, the film asks what such conviction costs.

The memories of Aoi prevent Arthur’s actions from becoming merely vigilantism. Whatever has happened between them — whatever loss he carries — has clearly altered how he understands violence, connection and responsibility.

The past and present therefore begin to bleed together.

Byungdoo Choi’s music, alongside contributions from Vincent Just and Matthew Lee, reinforces the film’s meditative character rather than pushing the action toward conventional adrenaline. The soundscape frequently allows silence and ambient city noise to carry equal importance, creating the strange sensation that Los Angeles itself is watching Arthur move through it.

The approach works especially well because The Modern Samurai never attempts to turn its protagonist into a superhero. Arthur feels vulnerable. Samurai mythology is frequently reduced in modern pop culture to swordsmanship and combat proficiency. Jacyna seems considerably more interested in the philosophical dimension of the archetype — discipline, responsibility, loyalty and the willingness to act according to a code even when doing so may be irrational or dangerous.

In Arthur’s case, that code exists without ceremony. There is no master.

Only choice.

There are moments when the film’s deliberate ambiguity may frustrate viewers looking for clearer narrative answers, particularly surrounding Arthur’s past and the exact emotional relationship between memory and present action. But Jacyna appears comfortable leaving those spaces unresolved.

The film asks to be felt before it is explained.

That decision also separates The Modern Samurai from many contemporary action shorts, which often use their limited runtime to showcase choreography or technical bravado. Jacyna certainly includes violence, but the film seems more interested in the seconds before and after it.

Arthur is not a modern samurai because he carries a weapon or knows how to fight. He is one because he appears to believe that the world still requires a code. Even when the world offers no evidence that such a code matters.

Perhaps especially then.

At just under fourteen minutes, The Modern Samurai plays like a fragment of a much larger internal journey, yet its incompleteness feels intentional. Jacyna does not resolve Arthur’s loneliness or erase the memories that follow him through the city.

Instead, he leaves him moving forward.

Through a Los Angeles that seems permanently suspended somewhere between beauty and danger.

For a film centered around pursuit, The Modern Samurai is surprisingly contemplative. Its most compelling question is not whether Arthur will catch the people he follows.

It is whether a person can maintain honor in a world where honor no longer appears to be required.

Jacyna wisely leaves that question unanswered.

He simply gives us a man still trying.