The opening images of Tornado are striking. A wild-haired young woman in Japanese peasant garb runs for her life through a barren forest and across burnt-orange fields. As her pursuers, a rough-looking band of thieves, draw nearer, she seeks refuge in a seemingly deserted mansion. Where are we? When are we?
Tornado’s title card informs us that we’re in the British Isles – actually, Scotland – c. 1790, but fans of director John Maclean’s first film, Slow West, will be familiar with this cinematic landscape of brutal virtues, a place where myth, mist, and murder combine to overwhelm the senses. His new film, co-written with Kate Leys, is an even more stylized foray into the territory of Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa.
The chase begins when the eponymous heroine makes the fatal mistake of stealing from professional thieves. Her offence, almost a teenage prank, seems to stem from frustration with her life among a group of travelling performers. With her father, Fujin (Takehiro Hira), a master puppeteer, she entertains rural audiences with Samurai marionettes.
The act’s big finish calls for the duo to drop the puppets and leap onstage with swords flying, a finale that enchants rural audiences. “They always cheer when evil is winning,” mutters her father. “Because good is boring,” replies a sulky Tornado. (Hers is the rare case of a footloose protagonist longing for the opposite of running away to join the circus.)
Tornado’s bad guys couldn’t be any more menacing. Their leader, Sugarman, is played by Tim Roth (pictured right, at centre), who can make the slightest gesture seem like a murderous threat. Sugarman’s greyish complexion and bone-weary stride only make him more terrifying: This is a man with nothing to lose.
His henchman, including a big, wry guy called Kitten (Rory McCann, pictured above, at left), fear him, but they’re hopeless at hench-work: When they ransack a local laird’s mansion in search of Tornado, one dreamy-headed thug (Bryan Mills) is too distracted by a grand piano to notice that Tornado is hiding directly upstairs.
Only Sugarman’s canny son, called Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), hangs back, seething with resentment at his father’s constant abuse. The unexpected clash with Tornado and Fujin presents him with a shot at a bigger cut of the heist and, perhaps, a chance to displace his father.
With little dialogue and near-relentless action sequences, Tornado’s pace, and the boldness of its East-meets-West-meets-Scotland mélange, overcomes the movie's faintly absurd premise: that one small woman, even one schooled in swordplay, can outmatch a small army of brutes. Yet in the person of Koki, a model-singer-songwriter turned actor, Tornado gradually lives up to her fearsome name. The great cinematographer Robbie Ryan (The Favourite), frames the villains as a pack of stalking wolves, beneath a permanent January sky. When Maclean’s singular heroine emerges from the cold to take her revenge, Tornado hits with the force of an ice storm.
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