Tornado: this Scottish Samurai saga leaves us lost

Telegraph

12-06-2025

Tornado whirls in with promising novelty on its side. When was the last time we saw an attempt at a samurai western set in 1790 Scotland? It hardly draws breath, which sounds like a good thing, but then you start to notice it's built from stunted components. Why, for instance, does the characterisation wind up being so stick-figure-ish, and the story so curtailed?
It has taken a decade for writer-director John Maclean to follow up his 2015 debut Slow West, a gnarled, bruising business with Michael Fassbender as a bounty hunter in 19th-century Colorado.
Maclean loves to plot an ambush and lurk in the bushes waiting for it. If these films set the tone for a durable career – which I genuinely hope they do – the game will be guessing who survives each foray of his, and trusting him to trip up our expectations.
This is exactly where Tornado fumbles and leaves us lost. Our rooting interest defaults, without enough care, to the title character, played by the 22-year-old Japanese model/songwriter Kōki. She's an itinerant puppeteer, being trained by her father (Takehiro Hira) to put on ingenious jidaigeki equivalents of a Punch and Judy show, using their covered waggon as a stage. He's also instructing her in swordplay, upon which her survival in this dog-eat-dog tale is heavily contingent.
We begin midway through the action, with Tornado chased across blustery braes, then seeking refuge in a stranger's mansion. A gang of brigands, headed by Tim Roth 's dogged Sugarman, are sure she knows the whereabouts of two sacks of gold, which have mysteriously vanished during one of her puppet shows. Sugarman's snake of a son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), knows more than he's letting on, scheming to double-cross the lot of them.
The narrative switchbacks are gunning for a Tarantinoesque finesse: Roth slits a confederate's throat for no clear reason, until the flashback half an hour later explains it. The scenario has solid potential as a plunge into Treasure of the Sierra Madre-style paranoia.
The way it's executed here, though, plants an awful lot of stumbling blocks. Continuity's all over the shop. Alleged storms brew out of clear blue skies. The gold migrates here, there and everywhere. If production problems didn't thwart Maclean and crew from making a proper fist of all this, the editing took its eye off the ball.
The actors are left increasingly high and dry. Roth can do soul-sick fatigue alright, and Lowden scores as a treacherous lone wolf, but they barely have any other notes to play. Among their accomplices is a black, stone-cold killer named Psycho (Dennis Okwera), who – a rank cliché, this – never utters a word.
Kōki's character, meanwhile, speaks inexplicable amounts of English, even to herself, and she's too unready as an actress to find a headspace that's sorely missing in the script. Meanwhile, bright red splashes of gore streak garishly across the movie.
Some of Robbie Ryan's wide shots have a stark grandeur, at the very least – especially when Jed Kurzel's doomy, drum-laden score kicks in. Thanks to their efforts, we're at least fitfully absorbed until the last act – a sorely unemotive climax, despite laboured stabs in that direction. It ends with neither a whimper nor a bang, but a muffled thud.
15 cert, 91 min. In cinemas June 13