John Maclean’s new movie is a dour, pessimistic, almost surrealistically downbeat revenge western set in Scotland in the late 18th century – but it could as well be happening in some post-apocalyptic landscape of the distant future or on another planet. This is the follow-up to his debut Slow West, and as with that film it is shot by Robbie Ryan with music by Jed Kurzel (director Justin’s brother and collaborator). I have to admit, though, that this does not quite have the energy or the fluency of that previous film, perhaps not the same production resources either – and by comparison it is more strenuously contrived. Yet the pure strangeness of the movie commands attention and there is a charismatic lead performance by Japanese actor-musician Mitsuki Kimura, or Kôki.
She plays a dancer called Tornado, who travels around what looks like utterly empty terrain with her impresario father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) in a covered wagon, putting on a samurai show. They perform with puppets, whose little lopped-off heads and limbs squirt out fake blood with tiny ingenious pumps; they also demonstrate samurai sword-twirling combat themselves. They appear to have once been part of a travelling circus encamped elsewhere. And who do they perform to? A crowd of people show up out of nowhere, having presumably walked many miles from the (unseen) villages where they live.
Among this crowd is a sinister, motley gang of violent thieves led by Sugarman – a solidly uningratiating and menacing performance from Tim Roth – and his quasi-son (or perhaps actual son) Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), whom he bullies mercilessly. They are so diverted by Tornado’s show that a little kid steals two bags of stolen gold at their feet, and so they set out on a brutal expedition to reclaim their loot and punish the kid, which leads into a violent confrontation with Tornado whose samurai skills and martial arts moves are not just for show.
It really is a weird drama, made the weirder for a timeline-shuffling effect at the beginning for an episode that takes us to the local manor house, whose laird is played by Alex Macqueen. Many scenes are played out to the accompaniment of high, sometimes almost gale-force winds. And the gang themselves do not travel by horseback: they simply walk everywhere, a disturbing itinerant caravan of bandits on foot who never need to eat or sleep or take shelter. In some ways, they are the evil version of the travelling players whom they are pitted against and the confrontation has the quality of a peculiar lucid dream. It’s a puzzle of a film in many ways, but it shows that Maclean has his own film-making language.
• Tornado screened at the Glasgow film festival and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 23 May.
