Samurai and Their Daughters: Tornado & Bushido

I was interested in Tornado just from the trailer, then looked it up and saw it was from the director of Slow West and really got my interest piqued.. Then… Wait, ten years since Slow West? Nothing in between? Well, one music video for his brother's band, but, yikes. I remember people being pretty fond of his movie, even if it was kind of an odd duck of a western, but, yikes, what has he been up to since then? IMDB and other online resources like it aren't definitive - you can be developing stuff and even getting paid for your work and have it never have it logged because for one reason or another it never becomes a credit - but it still seems kind of sparse. You'd expect to see a little TV or something, right? Maybe a movie you never heard of because Netflix picked it up and it was made available without any fanfare?

I've seen it happen before - go back far enough in this blog and you'll see me saying much the same thing about the gap between Jump Tomorrow and Last Chance Harvey - and it makes me wonder anew just to what extent it's harder than it ever was to get a movie made.

Anyway, in an enjoyable theme stretch, the next night Bushido played at the MFA as part of their Japanese Film series, and it too features an unusual samurai and his daughter, which is a really fun bit of serendipity, considering they were made at opposite ends of the world.

Tornado

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2025 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime link for pre-order)

Tornado is an impressively mean little bit of pulp that remixes its various influences well but is modest about it. Director John Maclean isn't particularly looking to show off his bona fides or encyclopedic knowledge of various genres, but serving up some creative violence and the grim results of paternal conflict for 90 minutes.

Taking place in the year 1790, it starts in media res, with the title character (Mitsuki "Koki," Kimura) running across the Scottish Highlands, a young boy (Nathan Malone) not far behind, pursued by a gang of highwaymen. Their leader Sugarman (Tim Roth) pursues with patient but ruthless determination while son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden) hangs back, watching for details his father misses and planning to act on his own. Before long, we'll see how all this started, with Tornado frustrated by her strict former-samurai father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) and the traveling puppet show where they barely make ends meet, although it's good enough that things go to hell when the highwaymen stop to watch and everyone gets sloppy and greedy.

It's a basic chas/revenge story, but Maclean keeps it from feeling rote, strewing bits of backstory about to casually connect or leave mysterious as best serves the very focused plot. He starts with what is probably the second big chase piece, chronologically, not so much to hide something as to focus on who the core cast is rather than to set the audience up for disappointment because he kills favorites early or introduces potentially critical connections late. You can probably piece together a lot about how Fujin and Tornado wound up traveling alone in Eighteenth Century Scotland and enjoy wondering about the rest, and enjoy how protagonists and antagonists alike feel like natural groups rather than folks forced together by authorial fiat.

That's especially notable during the relatively brief scenes with Tornado and Fujin, who come off a bit dysfunctional, with Mitsuki Kimura playing a modern sort of archetype - the assimilated child of immigrants - without coming off as too Twenty-First Century or being allowed particularly long stretches to show how her brattiness has led to disaster. It's a natural complement to how Takehiro Hira plays Fujin as someone who has left the warrior's life behind but can't quite shake the attitudes it has ingrained in him; you can see their well-intentioned instincts making things worse. The other parent and child probably don't have better instincts and are way too much alike for their own good: Both Sugarman and Little Sugar know they're smart and ruthless, which manifests as seasoned, witty self-assurance from Tim Roth but overeagerness and a smirk about how much more clever he is from Jack Lowden.

It's a set-up for doling violence out in rather casual fashion. The choreography is never really complicated - the point often is that it doesn't really take much to kill a person, especially if you're unsentimental about it, or that being very good with a weapon may not mean much if the other person strikes before you realize it's a fight to the death - but some of the kills have an impressive vicious or absurdity nevertheless, with more than a couple bits quick but ingenious enough to make a viewer search their memories for if they've seen that before. It's a little meta about how much fun this is, with a word about audiences cheering for violence rather than heroes, but doesn't raise itself above its anti-heroine as she maybe trades one piece of her soul for another.

For those who have seen Slow West, there's little doubt it's from the same guy. It's not necessarily relaxed as it pushes through its chase in steady but relentless fashion, but it's got the same sorts of moments where it pauses to show its amoral characters framed in a harsh but beautiful land and preference for just enough dialog to make introspection readable. The music is harsh and discordant at times, as uninterested in messing around as the rest of the film, though it happily adds genre notes where appropriate.

This one isn't for everyone - there's a lot more cruelty than fun to its grindhouse violence - but Maclean does well in shrinking a revenge epic down to size and making it work without a lot of fuss.


Gobangiri

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 May 2025 in Museum of Fine Arts Remis Auditorium (Festival of Films from Japan, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I scribbled "go" under "mahjongg" on an imaginary list of board games to learn so I can appreciate asian films early on in this one. It's an entertaining period piece that I suspect is especially charming to those who know the game and can perhaps see its philosophy and strategy throughout.

Its central figure is Kakunoshin Yanagidi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), a vagrant samurai behind on his rent because he is making his living as a carver and not that many people in Edo's Yoshiwada district need personal seals. His true passion is the game of go, shared by pawnbroker Genbei Yorozuya (Jun Kunimura), and they become close friends; it doesn't hurt that Genbei's employee Yakichi (Taishi Nakagawa) is quickly smitten with Yanagadi's lovely and intelligent daughter Okinu (Kaya Kiyohara). Two events throw this potentially pleasing arrangement into chaos: The arrival of old friend Kajiki Samon (Eita Okuno), who informs Yanagidi that rival Hyogo Shibata (Takumi Saito) has been identified as the actual person behind the events that led to Yanagidi's exile, and the disappearance of money during a game between Yanagidi and Genbei which Yanagidi and Okinu go to dangerous lengths to repay.

I find myself very impressed at how what could often be a whimsical premise for a movie quickly becomes dead serious here. The honorable ronin whose true passion is go and who needs his sensible daughter's care reveals a dark side when given a righteous cause; the bushido code itself appears to bring out the very worst in him, and in others. Director Kazuya Shiraishi and his crew often shoot the film in cheery, nostalgic fashion - this isn't a grimy, "you know it's serious because it's dark" film - but it's clear early on that living in this land means potentially being at the mercy of violent maniacs who are far too willing to let a situation escalate to formalized murder.

That's the most fascinating part of Tsuyoshi's portrayal of Yanagidi, which initially presents as stiffly earnest and formal, the samurai who has been restricted to inaction by his training and the expectations of his caste to be an outsider among ordinary people that only occasionally reveals the dark side that lurks within, letting you spend the second half of the movie wondering just how far he will sink. It makes the confrontations with Takumi Saito's Shibata entertaining in seeing how one doesn't know what to do with his dark impulses while the other is clearly just covering them as is convenient. It also lets a couple of character actors used in fun ways; I seldom remember Jun Kunimura playing this cheerful, and Masachika Ichimura seems a bit less rigid than he might. Taishi Nakagawa and Kaya Kiyohara are a likable pair, and Kyoko Koizumi plays a neighbor who seems to have a handle on her own dark side, for better or worse.

It softens one up a bit before getting the more dramatic material with an often cheery first act. Its occasional bits of humor seem to be happily free of anachronism and never make things silly, with a nice way of emphasizing what is universal and familiar in a bygone time. You can feel the shift into darker material like a click as the filmmaker turns a dial to a new setting. The action is exciting but one can see how it could be corrosive.

I've got no idea how well it presents the game - folks near me in the theater seemed not-upset - but the filmmakers know how this stuff works, showing the broad strokes of the game, demonstrating a specific rare strategy that will be important later, but watching the players more than the game to the extent they can. They're tuned into the exact amount that selling these scores with a board game is kind of silly, even if we do take these games seriously.