Tornado: John Maclean brings exhilarating samurai action to Scotland

• Reviewed from the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival

It’s been ten years since Scottish writer-director John Maclean’s Slow West (2015) emerged, lauded at Sundance for its bleakly lyrical vision of assorted migrants, from a lovelorn Caledonian teenager to hardened bounty hunters, scrabbling to make a living – and avoid dying – in the unforgiving wilds of late-1800s Colorado. Remarkably assured for a feature debut, Maclean deftly undercut long-standing western tropes to posit his own revisionist, fatalistic mythmaking, the film’s New Zealand locations adding a subtle sense of dislocation.  

Maclean is back on home soil for his follow-up, set around a hundred years earlier than Slow West, but very much a thematic continuation: forging an alternate, heightened history, centred on colourful outsiders (vagabonds, artists, bandits), filtered through an idiosyncratic approach to genre. One could look at Tornado as Scottish western, a lean, mean, rousing tale of revenge; except, its heritage equally come from the East, namely the 16 year old Anglo-Japanese heroine ‘Tornado’ (Kōki), armed with a samurai sword.  

Tornado whips into action from the offset as our protagonist and a younger boy are pursued across desolate, windswept forest and plains by an implacable criminal gang. Led by Sugarman (Tim Roth), the posse are hunting two sacks of gold that they themselves stole, which are now missing. And as much as they – correctly – identify Tornado as the culprit, they’re not above turning on one another for the plunder, chief schemer being Sugarman’s own resentful son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden).  

It’s a smart opening gambit, not simply for establishing instant tension (aided in no small measure by composer Jed Kurzel’s jagged strings and pounding percussion). Tornado’s desperate escape, her seeming vulnerability and her evident “foreignness” all suggest that she’s ill-equipped to handle the icy intransigence of both the British winter and its ruthless natives. That would be our mistake. 

When we spool back to events earlier this same fateful day, Tornado’s life takes on another hue. She and her father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) are travelling entertainers whose act is part-marionette show, part-live action staged samurai combat. Despite the imaginative artistry, theirs is an impoverished existence and the relationship has been a fractious one ever since the passing of Tornado’s mother.

Tornado’s teenage rebellion clearly extends to rejecting Japanese cultural values that Fujin insists upon maintaining. Though her subsequent rash act of taking Sugarman’s gold has devastating consequences for her father and others, Tornado’s learned ability to wield a weapon isn’t just a means to survival; it’s her path to self-actualisation, to fully embrace who she is.    

So, why not add superhero origin story – arguably her name is a giveaway – to Maclean’s genre-splicing. When Tornado turns the tables on her aggressors, the film fully embraces its exploitation flick lineage with creative kills, lopped off limbs and geysers of blood. It also benefits from a charismatic lead. An established fashion model and musician back in Japan, Kōki may only have made her acting debut in 2022, but she proves adept at both the meditative drama and dynamic action. 

Maclean and co-author Kate Leys clearly want to blend the two. Sure, laugh at the slapstick nature of a villain’s blackly comic demise, but the montage of dead bodies (also employed in Slow West) speaks to a more sombre, reflective look at the inescapable fate of history’s bit-players. How many shoot/slice-‘em-ups start with a quote from Andrei Tarkovsky? 

The world Maclean and his collaborators build here is distinctive: 18th century feral Scotland is home to a Japanese swordsman, a French carnival strongman called Mint and a hulking Scottish thug called Kitten (Rory McCann), with a Cockney boss. Kirsty Halliday’s inventive costuming suggests nothing so much as a centuries-spanning dressing-up box. Kurzel’s soundtrack expands to include cascading chorals and Morricone-like Spaghetti Western flourishes. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography can make the lochs and woodlands appear both grim and like a Grimm Fairy Tale.  

If anything, Tornado’s tight 90-minute run time can count against it. Roth, Lowden and Hira are skilled enough to flesh out minimal dialogue and screen time, but half Sugarman’s gang don’t even have names beyond ‘Archer Bandit’ or ‘Musician Bandit’. Joanne Whalley’s travelling circus troupe are similarly too peripheral, given their narrative function. Picking off his central targets, though, Maclean achieves his aim: to provide exhilarating samurai action while asking existential questions about the elemental forces that dispassionately shape, and can destroy us. It’s akin to the rationale Fujin’s swordsman puppet gives to justify his nefarious deeds: “Why? The most evil of all reasons: no reason at all!”

► Tornado is in UK cinemas 23 May.