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Tornado Is an Attractive Thriller That Reaches Too Hard for Genre Cred

Tornado Is an Attractive Thriller That Reaches Too Hard for Genre Cred
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It’s interesting how a filmmaking choice that imbues a movie with instantly gripping tension can also, simultaneously burden the same film with unfortunate baggage later on. Such is the case with Scottish director John Maclean’s attractively made but haphazardly structured and paced Tornado, his sophomore film coming a decade after the similarly lustrous, well-received revisionist western Slow West. This new, Scottish-set blend of western and samurai cinema influences seems to desire, in its bones, to be a dire, grounded, struggle-for-survival thriller with themes revolving around the influence of fatherhood and the fallout of impulsivity and greed, but it’s arguably led astray by an imperative to swing in the direction of pulpier (and sellable) revenge story, backloading its genre goods so deeply that when they finally arrive late in the game, they derail the more contemplative mood that has been established. Tornado is left stranded between tones, set adrift without a rudder.

Despite that, it’s frequently transfixing, never more so than in its earliest moments. Tornado begins in media res, with a teenage Japanese girl stumbling and desperately trying to maintain her footing as she flees across clumps of Scottish heath. The year is 1790. Behind her, a group of adult men in dark grays and black–bandits of a kind, it would seem–plod solemnly after her. They don’t run; they don’t seem to need to. They know there’s no place for their quarry to hide for long. It’s a thrillingly direct, largely wordless intro to get the audience invested in a pursuit that clearly has life-or-death consequences. When the girl takes refuge, hiding within a plush country estate mansion, we can see that the other residents are about to be in supreme danger as a result of the unknown fugitive who is suddenly amid their ranks.

The girl in question, we come to learn later, is Tornado (Japanese actress Kōki), who along with her supposedly ex-samurai father Fujin (Takehiro Hira of Shogun) operates a traveling puppet show theater in the Scottish countryside, living off the alms of local farmers even as her father trains her in samurai code and the way of the blade in an endless, Lone Wolf and Cub-esque journey. How did they come to be here, living this nomadic entertainers’ existence in the Georgian era U.K.? We’re never afforded even a whiff of a hint, although perhaps we can surmise that there’s an autobiographical element to their samurai puppet show, filled with betrayal, murder and revenge. Regardless, Tornado has grown into a restless young woman, chafing against the strict protectionism of her wary father, yearning to take a few independent steps into a dangerous world where she can’t help but be seen as an Other. And that’s when opportunity (and deadly consequence) falls into her lap.

Tornado’s MacGuffin is a classic one: A few weighty bags of gold recently acquired by the gang led by Sugarman (Tim Roth, weary but commanding) and his ambitious, scheming son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden). Foolishly unattended as the gang rests among the audience of Tornado and Fujin’s puppet performance, the bags of gold are quickly scooped up by the nearest opportunist, which is not initially Tornado. But as the keen crowd observer takes in what is happening, Tornado hatches her own little delusion of grandeur, and is faced with a moment of impulsivity and critical choice: Intercept the gold, or continue on with a nomadic existence that may last for the rest of her life. Of course, attempting to insert herself in the gang’s business–without her father’s awareness–may well have just drastically shortened said lifespan.

These are all details that are drip-fed to us via an extended flashback sequence in the film’s center, which unfortunately has the effect of taking the early propulsiveness of Tornado’s first 20 minutes or so and bringing them to a screeching halt. One can understand why Maclean was keen on immediately dropping his audience into the most suspenseful sequence of his screenplay, but the choice to embrace the nonlinear narrative ultimately isn’t particularly well justified–our flashback to the instigating events of the story mostly contains material that we would have already inferred, and few additional layers of meaning to anything we’ve already seen. The primary function of the flashback is to ground us in the relationship between Fujin and Tornado, to add stakes to the parental death we more or less already know is coming–a loss that would probably feel more visceral if we experienced it playing in order, rather than having it spelled out for us in advance. Maclean’s narrative isn’t very well served by electing to chop up its natural build.

With that said, Tornado does feel like a properly gritty example of what one might refer to as “historical low fiction,” in the same sense of high vs. low fantasy fiction. There are stylized, subtly fantastical elements to some of the costuming and visual stylings, but the film primarily stands out for the realistically unostentatious depiction of its characters. No one is on horseback; not even the band of thieves who have recently stolen a small fortune in gold. They plod everywhere they go, nursing wounds old and new. It feels like a setting where nearly every person depicted has needed to scrape and claw and viciously claim any scrap of sustenance that they can. Any attempt at peaceful or supportive community in this kind of world will always be at risk of being immediately pillaged by a more bellicose group that exists to prey on the weaker ones. Never is there a single mention of an authority figure, government oversight, or law enforcement. This is the setting that breeds the likes of Roth’s Sugarman, who in his first appearance on screen nonchalantly walks by one of his own men and casually slices his throat open as he passes by, a punishment for some infraction we as yet know nothing about. All the other men in the band of thieves file past wordlessly as the excommunicated member dies, totally inured to this kind of unpredictable violence. They’re a truly vicious assembly.

And this sense of realistically textured, arbitrary violence, more than anything else, makes the late-in-the-game tonal evolution of Tornado into a righteous, ass-kicking revenge thriller feel oddly inappropriate. By the time the titular teenager has reclaimed her sword and actually set her sights on avenging her father, there are perhaps 15-20 minutes left in Maclean’s feature, which makes the idea of her carving a bloody path to Sugarman feel like a somehow perfunctory epilogue to a story that has already been pretty effectively told by that point, if needlessly complicated. It plays as it might have played if a film like Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge had held back on the content promised by the title until 80% of the way through its runtime, and when Tornado finally begins to slice these men up, the deaths play out with cartoonish exaggeration that feels deeply out of place with the style of coldly impersonal killing that has preceded them, although the spurts of blood do finally make the viewer understand why it is that horror streamer Shudder would have acquired it. Regardless, it feels strange for the director to now ask us to take giddy pleasure in the righteous killings, playing the violence for pulp and entertainment value after 70 minutes of approaching the scenario from a more sober, remorseful mindset.

The point is, Tornado doesn’t ultimately need to metamorphize into The Bride or Rambo in order for Maclean’s film to be compelling, which makes its last-minute swerve in the direction of First Blood-style guerrilla vengeance feel incongruous and largely unnecessary, as if the filmmaker was asked to fill the project with this kind of content and instead slipped it into the closing minutes under protest. It’s as if Maclean felt his film needed some greater form of genre credibility, in the form of spilled blood, when the tension and suspense it deploys in its finer moments already functioned just fine in setting the hook. You can’t help but wonder what aspect of Tornado was more dear to the filmmaker’s heart, and why, if he did indeed want to make a more unabashedly pulpy, silly revenge film, he doesn’t get to that business with more of a sense of urgency. Tornado could be Female Prisoner Scorpion, or it could be Akira Kurosawa, but it’s difficult for it to be both simultaneously.

Despite the discordancy this tonal back-and-forth creates, it doesn’t diminish the entrancing quality that Tornado has at its best, its crisp and sparse outdoor cinematography in the inhospitable Scottish lochlands blending seamlessly with a haunting, atmospheric score leaning on elements of synth and harp. Watchable despite its flaws, well cast all around, but seemingly unsure of how it intends to be read, it’s a blade that ultimately cuts both ways.

Director: John Maclean
Writer: John Maclean
Stars: Kōki, Tim Roth, Takehiro Hira, Jack Lowden, Joanne Whalley, Rory McCann
Release date: May 30, 2025


Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.

 
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