Critical response
Contemporary reviews of High and Low were generally positive. Upon release in the United States, some questioned whether investigative techniques such as handwriting profiling and voiceprint analysis were possible in Japan at the time. Some critics praised the film's blocking and staging. A review in Kinema Junpo magazine praised the film's direction, proclaiming it "a masterpiece" with a rich imagination, however criticising the lack of characterisation and "organic unity" between the film's two halves. The Los Angeles Times considered it a structural departure from Kurosawa's earlier films, celebrating High and Low's camera work and social perspective. In Time magazine's review, Kurosawa's scene composition was praised, as was his ability to build suspense; yet the review criticised the film's pacing after the kidnapper's identity is discovered, further referring to the story as "hackneyed, and at times implausible".
At the Venice Film Festival, a negative review in Cahiers du Cinéma dismissed the film's modern context and its "metaphysics and morality [...] taking precedence over suspense". It further criticised the film for police apologia and having sympathy for its rich protagonist but considered the train sequence to be beautiful. Sight and Sound, viewing the film at Venice, dismissed it as "turgid and disappointing". Upon release in the UK, a 1967 review in the magazine by Robert Vas singled out High and Low's structure as particularly inspired. Vas commended the film's technical elements, including the lighting and acting, but he criticised the film's ending as an uncomplicated message delivered by obvious metaphors. Writing for the Kenyon Review in 1965, Charles Higham praised the film's geometric design before analysing the film's third act as a humanistic exposure of modern Japan.
Most American reviewers responded positively to High and Low's formal style, but did not think the source material was worthy of the art. In The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann lauded the film's technical elements but questioned why Kurosawa made the film, believing it retained a facile sense of the moral conflict found in the detective fiction of Hunter's novel. Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune praised Kurosawa's creation of suspense and the expansion of the novel's moral conflict, but she did not consider it one of the ten best films of the year. Howard Thompson of The New York Times considered the film to be an outstanding achievement among detective films, going on to commend the execution of the ransom-exchange sequence on the train and the performances of Mifune and Nakadai. Upon viewing the film, the critic Tadao Satō considered it, along with other works of Kurosawa's made after I Live in Fear (1955), to be drained of thematic and sentimental meaning. He thought the characters acted irrationally, particularly concerning the motivation of Yamazaki's kidnapper.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, High and Low has an approval rating of 97% based on 70 critic reviews; those with a score formed an average of 8.3/10. In a 1988 special edition of Kinema Junpo magazine, a poll of readers and 39 critics ranked the film the second best film of 1963, behind only The Insect Woman. Tsutomu Yamazaki, viewing the film nearly 30 years after its release at the Sydney Film Festival, still considered the film "fresh and interesting", but criticised his performance as substandard. Meanwhile, Yutaka Sada considered his own performance to be his best work in all of Kurosawa's films. The filmmaker Takashi Miike recalled feeling a kinship with the film, including an obsession with its final scene. Director Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker" in 2014, and on the list of his 84 favorite films in 2024. In a GQ interview published in June 2025, video game designer Hideo Kojima named it as one of his four favorite films, though he noted his preferences shift over time.
Shortly before the 1986 American re-release of High and Low, Paul Attanasio, writing in The Washington Post, noted that it did not count among Kurosawa's masterpieces, but favourably compared the film's plot and symbolism with William Shakespeare's plays and connected the film with Throne of Blood (1957), Kurosawa's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, saying that High and Low is "Macbeth, if Macbeth had married better." In 1998 the film journalist Masaaki Tsuzuki referred to the film as "the great fruit and one of the last moments" of Kurosawa's humanism. David Parkinson, writing for Empire in 2006, gave it four out of five stars, commenting on the film's use of obscured comparison between social classes to illustrate that the equality between men is separated by the choices they make when faced with a crisis. Scott Tobias wrote for The A.V. Club in 2008 that the film's divided structure heightened its realism to create a powerful sense of suspense. Writing for The Guardian in 2025, Peter Bradshaw rated High and Low five stars out of five. He praised the film's storytelling and moral dilemma, referring to Gondō as "the ultimate capitalist ... [who finds] it isn't at all clear if he thinks his compromised moral heroism and sacrifice has been worth it."
