Leave it to Scottish filmmaker John Maclean, director of the eccentric Western riff Slow West, to once again lean into, and shatter, genre tropes. With his latest film, Tornado, it’s the classic samurai film made famous by the great Akira Kurosawa. But it doesn’t end there, as Maclean’s dreary, frigid revenge tale also deconstructs the frontier drama and the outlaw spirit, centering on a British-Japanese girl who grew up as part of a traveling circus.
Maclean doesn’t bullshit around, either. Set in late 18th-century Britain, Tornado begins with the titular heroine (Kōki) as she scrambles through a barren field. In horror movie fashion, she is pursued slowly by a group of bandits led by Sugarman (Tim Roth). They don’t seem to be in a hurry, knowing their prey has no place she can go. She attempts to hide in a British manor, where the silence and stuffy occupants threaten to expose her at every move. Hot on her trail are the lumbering Kitten (Rory McCann in too small a role) and the shifty Little Sugar (Jack Lowden). In one of the rare moments of humor, the massive Kitten crashes through the floorboards, landing on a piano and shattering it to bits. “She’s not in the piano”, he says oafishly.
Part of the fun of Tornado is the way Maclean doles out bits of information without skipping a beat. We don’t know why Tornado is being pursued until Little Sugar has her isolated from the rest of the group, and not only do we find out why, but we also discover the depth of his own deceptions. Meanwhile, Sugarman is just a nasty piece of work and all we need to prove it is how he casually slits the throat of one of his own men and never stops long enough to slow his stride. That his men don’t seem to bat an eye tells us all we need to know about how accustomed they are to such brutality. In short: Tornado needs to keep away from these dudes.
The economy of narrative is a real plus for this 90-minute effort. Maclean’s lean storytelling introduces a number of characters that we instantly feel a connection to, such as Tornado’s honorable father (Takehiro Hira), a samurai and trained puppeteer, who sticks to the warrior code in order to defend his daughter. Unfortunately, he faces dishonorable men with no code. There’s also the traveling circus troupe who risk their livelihood to protect Tornado from Sugarman’s clutches.
Cruelty and death create Tornado‘s gloomy atmosphere. Sugarman’s indifference reflects the knowledge that outlaws like him are a dying breed, soon to be ghosts as a new era of modernity is ushered in. In that way, Sugarman has much in common with the samurai as they faced irrelevance to a new means of warfare. So what he does is lash out in a wave of violence that consumes everything and everyone around him.
As for Tornado, we learn through flashback that she is very much like a normal teenager. She rejects her father’s traditional teachings and denies her heritage, and she REALLY dislikes having to be part of this embarrassing puppet roadshow. In the present, she proves to be resourceful and caring until finally she realizes that playing nice isn’t going to get her out of this jam. The only way to do it is to embrace her father’s teachings and honor the samurai code.
In the final act, Tornado becomes something different altogether. A bloody, one-sided tale of vengeance finds Sugarman and his crew on the business end of Tornado’s katana, exploding into gruesome, blood-gushing violence. There’s a good, grizzly time to be had here and you can tell Maclean is loving it, too. One unfortunate baddie gets his head skewered by a sword stuck in a tree. They all underestimate the teen girl to their fatal detriment, and it plays out a little like a poor man’s Kill Bill. One thing is clear and it’s that Maclean’s resources were too limited to give these scenes the gravitas they deserve, and some of the showdowns suffer from being underwhelmingly short.
At the same time, Tornado‘s simple construction and grounded nature are its greatest strength, other than Kōki’s steely, confident performance. Maclean captures the hopelessness of the time in a brutal coming-of-age revenge fantasy that pays homage to the Kurosawa classics while also forging its own path.
Tornado is open in theaters now.
