Tornado
A brooding, stylised samurai Western set in the Scottish Highlands, John Maclean’s Tornado feels both ancient and post-apocalyptic. In many ways, the landscape itself is the film’s true protagonist. Like his directorial debut, Slow West, the film is lensed by Robbie Ryan, whose dynamic cinematography captures the unforgiving wind and barren hills in pale light and washed-out tones, as if the entire world were suspended in a permanent dawn or endless twilight. There’s a surreal grandeur to the emptiness – the handful of characters appear minuscule as they drift through it, their presence dwarfed by the vast landscape, with silence stretching interminably between their words.
The movie follows Tornado (Kôki) and her father Fujin (Takehiro Hira), travelling performers whose blood-spattered puppet theatre and razor-sharp swordplay unfold like poetic, brutal parables on good and evil, foreshadowing the violence to come. The story is hermetically sealed, a world unto itself. There is no attempt to explain how the father-daughter duo, with their samurai-themed act, ended up trekking through 18th-century Scotland in a creeping wooden cart. Maclean is pointedly uninterested in exposition, history, or backstory – and, for the most part, that ambiguity is part of the feature’s charm.
Tornado’s greatest weakness lies in its characters. Tornado exists more as a symbol than a character, while Fujin’s stoicism borders on opacity, with his motivations remaining elusive even by the film’s conclusion. Little Sugar (Jack Lowden) – a travelling bandit and surrogate son to the ageing gang leader, Sugarman (Tim Roth) – is a familiar archetype: the brooding, conflicted second-in-command torn between loyalty and betrayal, but never quite escapes the shadow of cliché. There are hints of something more in his tense relationship with Tornado, but it never deepens beyond a glare or a scowl. Roth is the exception: his Sugarman sneers and swaggers with the menace you’d expect. The rest of the gang – draped in cowboyish rags – often feel like strays from Westworld.
By prioritising its stylistic ambitions over a cohesive narrative, Tornado stumbles at times, yet Maclean’s vision remains undeniably distinct. Each character moves across the landscape like a revenant – eternal, transient, and trapped in an unrelenting half-light.
Christina Yang
Tornado is released nationwide on 13th June 2025.
Watch the trailer for Tornado here:
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