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Where we are and when, Tornado is prepared to tell us. The British Isles, 1790, a subtitle reads at the start of this singular period action mash-up, dwarfed by widescreen moorland. For now, further information is none of our business. Soon, a young woman sprints past the camera and towards the horizon. A moment later, a group of men follow. They do not strike you as friendly types.
Film students, take note. Mere seconds have passed, not a word has been spoken, and we are already hooked on the other questions the scene leaves behind. Who? Why? What?
The first is simplest to answer. “I am Tornado,” the young woman will later explain. As played by Japanese singer-songwriter Kōki, she is the daughter of a samurai, here in the wilds of Georgian Britain. Yet though the 18th century is evoked, and so too the filmic treasures of Akira Kurosawa, the movie is really a Spaghetti Western, a tale of bad men, gold and revenge.
Director John McLean has history with the form: his 2015 debut Slow West dealt with bounty hunters in old Colorado. Now the crew in pursuit of Tornado are led by an implacable Tim Roth, with Jack Lowden among the goons. The gold is theirs, or at least they stole it last, and if many of them are incompetents, they are also murderous.
Tornado is at once kinetic and otherworldly, McLean’s visual storytelling timeless. Swords flash; eyes peek through cracks in walls. The backdrops are no less stripped down: a moor, a house, a forest.
And how fresh it all seems. The film is wry, even knowing. (It feels like no accident that Roth spends much of it bleeding, as he once did in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.) But while a lesser film would play the genre clash for laughs, McLean is dead serious about making a B-movie that sticks, with Kōki a heroine for the ages.
Midway through, a bunch of 18th-century urchins watch Tornado and her father stage a puppet show. The act is stylish and inventive, though the kids — being kids — mostly just cheer the violence. You may well get the same kick from the film. But it behoves us as adults to applaud what the children are too giddy to notice. With enough nerve and talent, wonders can be conjured with just a handful of figures and a few simple props, in the midst of a strange old country.
★★★★☆
In cinemas from June 13
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