Scottish Katana
Tornado
Directed by John Maclean
UK 2025
Tea House Pictures
Warning: Some spoilerage in this one folks.
Well let’s jump right in here then.
The British Isles, 1790... presumably somewhere in Scotland, which is where Tornado was shot. Tim Roth plays bad guy Sugarman, who has a small bunch of hoodlums with him.. and they have just stolen a lot of gold from a local church. He seems to be well known and unchallenged in the various small communities dotted around the area local to the forest, where the film’s title character is running from him... so I would assume he also collects protection money from those nearby. Also, he has a very casual and no nonsense way about dealing out death, which is presumably something else the locals know.
Indeed, the film starts off with the film’s central protagonist Tornado, played by Kôki, running from him and his gang, while also being kept an eye on by a young boy. It’s during this opening when we see Sugarman casually and quickly slit the throat of one of his own men as he passes on by him, which is obviously done to create a certain shorthand tension within the audience as to his character but, as it later turns out through way of a back story flashback, also makes a bit more sense later on. Because Tornado has stolen the gold from the young boy, who originally stole it from Sugarman’s thieves. And now the two are being hounded by them in a narrative which, probably lasts for only 24 hours at most, including the contents of that back story. Tornado’s father (played by Takehiro Hira) is killed while he was trying to protect her and now she is trying to get distance and shelter from Sugarman, before she then goes on to avenge her father’s death.
And that’s all I want to say about the specific story set up but, I will say that this film, the first Scottish samurai film that I personally know of, had me before even the first visual image of the story came on screen. And this is because the film starts off with an on screen, typographic quotation of an extract from a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky. Now, Arseny’s son, who was outlived by his father by three years, is my second favourite movie director Andrei Tarkovsky, so I figured that if the movie has anything like the beauty and poetry of the younger Tarkovsky’s works, well then I was in for a treat.
And I really was, it turns out.
The film is lensed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan and, I have to say the whole thing looks absolutely stunning. Beautiful colours and locations shot in such a way that the frames just pop out. In the opening shots of Tornado trying to find a way to somewhere where she can hide, the films uses a lot of things seen between the camera and the principle actors, such as branches and tree trunks etc, which really gives the shots some depth. And all shot on 35mm film rather than just digitally, which is a treat in itself and would go some way to explaining why the thing looks so darn good.
The colours, too, as I mentioned earlier, are terrific. One wonderful sequence, for example, where Tornado’s small caravan has been set ablaze by Roth’s crew, has the inners of it burning a wonderful yellow/orange while the forest canopy and dark blue night sky envelope it. Just spectacular artistry.
There’s some beautiful foreshadowing going on too. Such as the travelling puppet show put on by Tornado and her father, depicting a samurai fight with some proper gore and splatter coming out of the marionettes themselves... as limbs and a head are sliced off. This, of course, foreshadows the fight scenes between the avenging Tornado and her antagonists towards the end of the picture, when things have taken a turn.
And as if to doff the cap to samurai director extraordinaire Akira Kurosawa, this director acknowledges Kurosawa’s own influences of the American westerns of John Ford on his samurai films by having a very lethal bad guy dressed in, pretty much, the kind of outfit you would find in a specific style of Western. During scenes such as these the violence, which has been relatively held back and kept in check until now, catches up to the kind of visceral carnage foreshadowed in the puppet show earlier on in the film.
One beautiful piece of action choreography, for example, features Tornado duelling with the cowboy dude while another bad guy on the floor is trying to painstakingly reload his flintlock pistol... all the while the fight is in progress. As soon as Tornado sees he has finally reloaded his weapon, she twists around and slices off his arm, which lands on the ground still gripping the pistol... then, as the muscles of the severed arm tighten, the flintlock discharges its load into the other guy she was fighting... really nice stuff.
Another interesting sequence, where Sugarman’s gang have invaded a mansion house where Tornado is hiding, has one of the gang sitting down to play the piano and this is an interesting incident of the non-diegetic music doubling up as diegetic soundtrack for the film. This is just before the actual soundtrack of the film is properly introduced which, again, is absolutely stunning work, this time by Jed Kurzel who is a composer I’ve not been all that fond of in the past but, yeah, this one is absolutely beautiful. And I think, if I’m not much mistaken (but, you know, I might be) that the score also makes good use of my second favourite instrument the cimbalom so... yeah. A shame this score hasn’t been released on CD, for sure. It would be getting quite a few spins in my player right now.
And added to all this, along with some wonderful editing, is some amazing acting. Even from supporting actors such as the always magnificent Joanne Whalley. But Time Roth is especially good in this, paring down on the words and using his facial expressions and attitude to really bring a sense of gravitas to the situation. This is especially well capped off in the final... let’s call it a ‘showdown’... between Sugarman and Tornado, which was funnily enough, almost exactly what I’d imagined it would be but, the way the scene plays out is absolutely wonderful and so, I can’t begrudge the lack of surprise in terms of the final denouement, so to speak.
The film also continues in the spirit of Kurosawa (and Tarantino in a scene in Kill Bill Part One, which I imagine must be inspired by Yojimbo), when Tornado lets one of the gang off the hook and allows him to leave with his life (a tactic she also tries a little earlier in the film, with a much bloodier outcome).
And that’s me done on what is, honestly, one of the best movies I’ve seen all year. Tornado is an absolute masterpiece as far as I’m concerned and I will be lining up for the Blu Ray the first week it gets released (fingers crossed it gets one because I’m having to buy an awful lot of unauthorised Blu Rays from other countries these days, to compensate for the inability of the studios to realise that physical media is actually the best way for their consumers to catch this stuff). I need to see this one again soon, I think.
