During the promotional tour for “Mad Max: Fury Road” back in 2015, director George Miller discussed how silent cinema had inspired the filmmaking ethos behind his chase-movie epic. His hope was that you could potentially watch “Fury Road” as a silent film and still get most of what you needed in terms of the story from the visual language and physical performances of the actors.
When it comes to milieu, the petrol-punk dystopia of “Mad Max” is far removed from the period-piece trappings of “Tornado,” writer-director John Maclean’s long-awaited follow-up to his offbeat western “Slow West” (2015). But for the length of its gripping first act, Maclean’s earthy survival thriller seems pointed towards very similar ends.
Light on dialogue and exposition, the roughly 25-minute opening stretch excels as a work of sustained tension, with the odd farcical stunt — reminding you that this is the same filmmaker behind the “Slow West” salt-in-wound visual gag — thrown in to complement rather than disrupt the tone. What dialogue there is in this first act tends to be pithy threats that could work just as well as intertitles in a silent film; they serve more as garnishes for what’s already conveyed by the sharp instincts of the movie’s largely excellent cast. It’s when the characters have a lot more to say later on that the film starts to falter.
Not every great chase film starts with the chase already in progress, but it’s usually a good way to lock in viewers. And so it goes that “Tornado” opens in media res, as the title character (Kôki), a young Japanese woman, dashes across fields in what onscreen text informs us is somewhere in the British Isles in 1790 (the film was largely shot near Carlops in the Scottish Borders area of Scotland). She’s quickly followed by a running younger boy (Nathan Malone), as though they’re being pursued by the same as-yet-unseen force in the unbroken opening shot that introduces everyone’s backs before their faces. And sure enough, into frame soon comes a group of much older men, walking swiftly rather than running.
This gang is led by Sugarman (Tim Roth), with other notable players in the group including Sugarman’s defiant adult son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), the towering Kitten (Rory McCann), implied to be the second-in-command, the lone pistol-wielder in a group whose weapons are mostly knives and arrows (Jack Morris as Squid Lips), and one bandit who seems to be there just to play music on their treks, played by Bryan Michael Mills who looks a lot like Paul Reubens. They’re hunting both Tornado and the boy, though the girl seems of greater concern. Following her to a country house just outside some woods, the gang harasses the inhabitants and split up across the property. This will be one of the few interior scenes across the relatively short runtime, as most of Maclean’s film is set in nature far away from towns or villages.
Previously teased with the odd line of dialogue, the specifics of why Tornado is being hunted are eventually laid out in a flashback that spells everything out in explicit detail, leaving us little to do besides soak up the film’s style — and compare it to Maclean’s previous work.
Starring Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee as an odd couple navigating the American West in search of a woman with a bounty on her head, “Slow West” stood out visually as a neo-Western with its deeply saturated colors and meticulously designed sets that drew comparisons to the work of Wes Anderson. While some of the Andersonian flourishes remain in the editing of certain violent encounters in “Tornado,” Maclean and his returning cinematographer Robbie Ryan get rich results from going in an opposite direction to “Slow West,” though while avoiding the route of total desaturation.
If “Slow West” ran hot, “Tornado” runs cold. It’s a film of mist, mud, icy rain and dying grass, with Ryan finding a kind of beauty in the miserable weather — something he previously achieved with Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” (2011), though Tornado’s widescreen frames are a far cry from the tight 1.37:1 aspect ratio of Arnold’s movie.
In terms of the widescreen images, one of the film’s more compelling recurring quirks is to deliver a tight close-up of one or two faces, followed by a cut to a shot showing much more of the given environment, but where a key piece of physical action is occurring at a very far distance from the camera. These are often bursts of violence, with the most striking example being where one man suddenly stabs another atop a hill. Despite the scene taking place in daytime, the darkness of the overcast sky and far distance of the camera from the altercation work together to make the men look like battling silhouettes, or shadow puppets projected onto the landscape.
”Tornado” thrives for a while off the novelty of transplanting both western and samurai film tropes to a British landscape, plus the rare cinematic portrayal of an Asian immigrant experience in Britain of the time. But it’s in the expansion of details after the early sections where Maclean struggles. While Takehiro Hira — a recent Emmy nominee for “Shogun” — is on typically strong form, his part is burdened with the film’s clunkiest dialogue, with his wise words being repeated verbatim by Tornado in the third act when she herself becomes the hunter.
Elsewhere, a few narrative byways, presumably intended to make the world of the film feel bigger than just this story, end up being distractingly half-baked. There are implications that the two central fathers of the piece have clashed before, though the more jarring examples of tangential threads concern a performing troupe with whom Tornado has a pre-existing relationship. But it also turns out that Sugarman has history with them too, particularly Joanne Whalley’s character Crawford, whose main function in the film ends up being to vaguely allude to backstories and past tensions for everyone else — details that ultimately fail to enrich the experience in any significant way. One especially maddening example: After Sugarman finds the body of a deceased comrade, he mutters something to the effect of “this land would go to hell if it wasn’t for men like you and me.” Very little of what Maclean has shown us across the film helps this declaration make sense or have any weight.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” is a movie whose smallest details and support characters successfully convey a world that stretches beyond the confines of the specific narrative being told. Crucially, a lot of that information is conveyed in costuming and production design, rather than dialogue on its own. But it’s also down to recognizing how to thread the needle between archetype and specificity. Despite considerable thrills throughout, Maclean’s writing makes it seem as though his characters never actually existed in their world before the film started.
Grade: B-
“Tornado” premiered at the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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