Tornado

The world has always been smaller than people believe. The Vikings traded with the Middle Eastern Sasanian empire. By the 15th century, Ethiopia had permanent embassies across Europe. So it’s in no way surprising that a Japanese puppeteer called Tornado (Kōki) could find herself pursued by brigands across the Scottish Lowlands at the end of the 18th century in period thriller Tornado.

Director John Maclean proved his way with period violence in 2015’s bloody post-Civil War drama Slow West. That measured panache with brutality has not faded in the intervening decade, as shown in the offhand way in which bandit chief Sugarman (a weary and ruthless Roth) calmly commits murder literally without even breaking stride in pursuit of Tornado and the gold that he stole that she in turn stole from him.

The exact geography of how Tornado and her father, Fujin (Hira, Shōgun, Gran Turismo), made their way across continents is less important than their attitudes to their own and their adopted cultures. Migrants and wanderers are common here, all shown by hints and implications. That the strong man in the traveling circus with which they occasionally cross paths is French means nothing more than the fact that one of the cutthroats in Sugarman’s gang is Black. Indeed, what’s more interesting about him is his garb and his sword, a lesson in costume as characters. Everyone here has drifted from somewhere else, to this remote place of accidental and dangerous meetings, their backgrounds quietly communicated in the extraordinary work of production designer Elizabeth El-Kadhi, art directors Robin Jones and Jackson Pritchard, and the costume designs of Kirsty Halliday. They ground this vision of Georgian Scotland in something other than post-Braveheart anachronisms or high-ceilinged Edinburgh tenements, creating a place that is in turn mystical, muddy, violent, and beautiful. It’s a place in which all these itinerant souls cross paths, bringing their histories with them.

For Tornado, that connection to history is in the puppetry that she and her father perform. This is not the formal world of bunraku, the complicated form of puppetry that requires three performers per puppet. Their artistry is in marionettes, a much later addition to Japanese theatre that was actually imported from China. It’s street entertainment, the kind performed as the pair wheel their bamboo-sided cart from small town to smaller village, entertaining children with a surprisingly grisly story of a samurai and his black-clad nemesis. Within its universal appeal to the bairns who chortle at their bloody antics there is still that cultural specificity, and in that tension between where we are and where we have come from is where Maclean finds his true drama.

Tornado is an undeniable success as a slow-burn, blood-soaked historical tragedy, both mournful and amoral, but it’s also a quietly fascinating exploration of identity and reinvention. Tornado’s clashes with her father about where they belong, about loyalty to traditions in an alien place, add a certain tension. So does the contrast between the roving marauders and the nomadic troupe of minstrels and entertainers, a subtext that only gains extra pertinence through the side story of Bryan Michael Mills as the ruffian with a squeezebox.

For the most part, there’s a naturalism to the storytelling, from which Maclean sometimes strays to mixed effect. Sometimes he becomes too low-key: His script (cowritten with veteran script editor Kate Leys) is so understated that it leaves some themes feeling incomplete, and nowhere it this more true than in the symmetry between Tornado and Fujin, and Sugarman and his vicious, duplicitous son, Little Sugar (Lowden, ragged and weaselly). At the same time, the inevitable over-the-top blood spray is an absurdist homage to the samurai sword play of the classic chanbara movies. Yet these are small diversions that cannot distract from how Tornado is at its most bracing when it blows like a chill moorland wind, low and constant.