Not many people had Tornado on their radar this weekend with the openings of Bring Her Back and Karate Kid, but I happened to catch a trailer somewhere and was intrigued.
A small indie film from the director of Slow West, Tornado tells the story of the titular character, the daughter of a samurai who makes his living in 1790s Scotland by putting on a traveling samurai puppet show. Tornado (Kôki) is a somewhat rebellious daughter, tired of doing the puppet show and rebelling by speaking in English rather than Japanese (embracing an apparent British/Spanish half that we never see or are told about in the movie to my knowledge). You can tell that she loves her father, though, and the missing mother is not acknowledged.
But before we get to all of that, we start out of order with a 20-minute scene of Tornado running and hiding from a group of bandits, led by Tim Roth. During this time, we get little explanation as to why these bandits are after Tornado or who Tornado is as a character, and it’s honestly a pretty sluggish way to kick off a 90-minute film. I didn’t find it particularly tense.
Then we pick a random moment to cut back to the beginning of this saga, showing a bit of Tornado’s role in the puppet show and her relationship with her father Fujin, (Takehiro Hira). There’s a bit of a meta-narrative with “Tornado” being the stage persona of Tornado as the daughter of a samurai getting revenge against an evil villain.
We then see the bandits fall upon the traveling show in an effort to steal its gold, a confrontation that leads to Fujin’s murder. And it’s a double blow, as Hira maybe gives the best performance of the cast, and we could have definitely had a few extra minutes of him to bolster what comes later.
Tim Roth is doing whatever the opposite of chewing the scenery is in an extraordinarily restrained performance that is at times intimidatingly stoic and at other times a bit boring. The other stand-out bandit is “Little Sugar,” played by Jack Lowden, who seems to always be angling for his own scheme and planning to keep the gold for himself. There is clearly a deep backstory between Roth and Lowden’s characters, but the exact nature of that relationship is left unexplored. And I am fine with a living, breathing backstory that the movie never goes into, but it feels like this movie becomes too opaque to quite enjoy the dynamics of the bandits.
Meanwhile, Tornado spends entirely too much of the film just kind of on the run. We don’t get a lot of opportunities to connect fully with her or better understand her. She finally does deliver on the revenge plot that the film trailer tantalizes, but it is not as compelling as it could have been with a deeper connection to the character. At the end of the film, a character tells Tornado that she is neither her father nor her mother, but her own person. That wisdom feels a bit off, given our lack of understanding about how Tornado feels about her mom.
That revenge portion of the film is a lot of fun though, with some insane kills that are framed in a very unstylized manner.
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Poor Things, Marriage Story) brought his A-game for this B movie, providing stunning cinematography to help tell the story. I haven’t seen John Maclean‘s debut feature film Slow West, but even in this film, I can see the spark of a very cool directorial style. He just hasn’t quite figured it out in his sophomore offering. I think his understated approach could one day make for a phenomenal film, but this wasn’t it.
