If Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood took Shakespeare’s Macbeth from medieval Scotland to Japan’s Sengoku period, then John Maclean’s Tornado, which enjoyed a sold-out world premiere at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, returns the favour by staging a samurai showdown in the Pentland hills. Set on the British Isles in 1790, Maclean’s film begins with a young woman, Tornado (model and songwriter Kōki), running through the hills, hotly pursued by a gang of men led by Tim Roth’s Sugarman. Maclean plunges the audience right into the middle of the story, before jumping back in time to the events which brought Tornado to this point.
Tornado and her dad Fujin are part of a travelling circus, performing samurai-themed bunraku (Japanese puppet theatre). We see them performing a good-versus-evil tale, complete with decapitations and spurts of fake blood, to the delight of a crowd in the woods. During the show Kōki becomes distracted by the arrival of Sugarman’s gang, the two sacks of gold they’re carrying, and the young boy who steals them from under the gang’s nose. Kōki makes an impulsive decision to take the gold from the boy, a decision that puts her and everyone she loves in the gang’s crosshairs.
Although the film takes a while to get going, the third act delivers with some gloriously pulpy violence that feels like an homage to the classic samurai films of yore. As Kōki goes after Sugarman’s henchmen one by one, guns are fired from severed arms and throats are pushed into blades of swords. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Poor Things, Bird) frequently shoots the duels in gorgeous backlit silhouettes. Unlike the bunraku that Kōki and Fujin perform, Tornado isn’t a simple battle of good-versus-evil. The sacks of gold corrupt everyone who comes into contact with them, and one of the henchmen finds redemption as part of the travelling circus.
Roth is excellent as the world-weary gang leader whose heart no longer seems to be in it, and moments of comic relief (‘she’s not in the piano’) provide notes of levity amongst the tension. The dialogue is occasionally a bit wooden and the swordplay isn’t going to thrill any diehard fans of the genre, but just as Maclean put his own spin on the western in his debut Slow West, with Tornado he gives us a novel take on the samurai revenge story.
Tornado has one more Glasgow Film Festival screening at 3.45pm on Thursday 27th February, and goes on general release on 23rd May.
