Tornado Review
Director John Maclean returns with another visually stirring piece of cinema in Tornado…
Some sixty years ago, the cinematic dictionary acquired a new phrase, one that’s echoed down the decades ever since. Spaghetti westerns – most significantly Leone’s The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966) and the epic Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) – have cast a long, instantly recognisable shadow over modern cinema, with directors such as Tarantino regularly drawing on their distinctive style. They were themselves inspired by Japanese cinema, although the two genres rarely come together in one film. But for his second, and latest, film, Scottish director John Maclean changes all that.
In Tornado, he takes us to the British Isles in 1790 – or so he says – in the company of a young Japanese woman (Koki) who gives the film its title. She travels the country with her father, Fujin (Shogun’s Takehiro Hira), and their Samurai puppet show, entertaining the people from villages in a windswept landscape. They find themselves tangling with a local gang, led by Sugarman (Tim Roth) and his son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), a rebel with his own agenda. There’s bags of money involved, which could mean a fresh start for father and daughter, so Tornado makes a decision that results in a race against time to wipe out the gang and hold on to the cash.
This is Maclean’s follow-up to Slow West (2015), his directorial debut and a more traditional western, but this time his approach is almost breathtakingly audacious. Merging the spaghetti western with a Japanese samurai movie and moving them to a location that, despite the description, feels decidedly more Scottish than English, he’s created a brutal landscape, one which could have easily be post-apocalyptic had he been so inclined. It’s one of the many unanswered questions permeating the film, making it more of an enigma than it needs to be, but adding to its strangely compulsive quality. We may have been told at the start that the setting is the late 18th century, but the majority of the cast seem to have been dressed by a 21st-century charity shop.
The film’s two Japanese players add to that strange fascination, as does the sparse dialogue – the opening relies on the sounds of the landscape to tell its story, even if it also means that the supporting characters suffer as a result. Roth and Lowden, however, are given enough to develop their father-son relationship. Lowden, in particular, gets his teeth into his character, who is potentially the nastiest of the lot, a weak and spiteful piece of work, constantly lurking in the shadows and on the look-out for any opportunity to undermine his father’s authority with the gang. And the bandits themselves have an otherworldly quality, walking everywhere and never in need of food or rest.
You never quite know where you are with Tornado, but the fascination with the characters, the landscape and the story itself is enough to make you stick with it. There will be times when you wonder if it’s worth it, but there will be others when you know it is. Maclean isn’t telling us what to make of the film. That’s up to us entirely.
★★★
In cinemas from June 13th / Tim Roth, Jack Lowden, Koki, Takehiro Hira, Rory McCann, Joanne Whalley / Dir: John Maclean / Lionsgate / 15
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