Tornado, Glasgow Film Festival review: 'vaguely sketched'

It’s been a decade since Scottish writer/director John Maclean’s pleasingly strange debut Slow West marked the former Beta Band member out as a filmmaker thoroughly in control of the genre (the western) he was working in and subverting. Sadly, that’s not quite the case with his belated follow-up film Tornado, a wilderness thriller with an intriguing samurai twist, set in an unnamed part of the British Isles in 1790, though shot primarily in Scotland.

Opening this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, it stars Tim Roth and Jack Lowden as Sugarman and Little Sugar, the father-son leaders of a group of murderous marauders who, as the film opens, are in pursuit of a young Japanese woman. We don’t yet know why, but details gradually emerge: some stolen gold has gone missing during the performance of a samurai-themed touring puppet show that the woman, who goes by the name of Tornado (she’s played by rising Japanese star Kôki) performs with her father (Takehiro Hira), a taciturn traditionalist who wants his resistant daughter to retain a connection to their homeland.

Their familial tension finds a harsher parallel in the relationship between Sugarman and Little Sugar, who resents his father’s insistence on giving every member of the gang an equal share of the loot he apparently did the most to procure.

When the two groups’ paths cross in violent fashion, these simmering generational conflicts come to the fore, but only Roth — whose character’s bleeding stomach wound feels like an arch tribute to his role in Reservoir Dogs — manages to imbue proceedings with any real depth.

The rest of the film is so vaguely sketched there’s no sense of who these characters are or what this world is. Consequently, when it eventually turns into a bloody revenge movie, the action feels frustratingly stilted, the title character never quite becoming the force of nature her name implies.

The Glasgow Film Festival runs until 9 March. For more information, and to book tickets, visit https://www.glasgowfilmfest.org/home/