During the campaign tour for ”Mad Max: Fury Road“Already in 2015, director George Miller discussed how quiet film had inspired filmmaking Etos behind his Chase-Film epic. His hope was that you could potentially look at “Fury Road” like a silent film And still get the most of what you needed when it comes to history from the actors’ visual languages and physical conceptions.
When it comes to the environment, petrol punk dystopia of “Mad Max” is far away from the period stop of “”Tornado“Writer director John Maclean’s long-awaited follow-up to his off-beat western”Slower”(2015). But for the length of its gripping first act, Maclean’s down -to -earth survival thriller seems to be pointed to very similar purposes.
Light on dialogue and exposure, the approximately 25-minute opening distance stands out as a work of long-term tension, with the odd Farcical Stuntet-reminds you that this is the same filmmaker behind the “slow vest” Salt-in-wounds visual gag-which is thrown in to supplement rather than disturb the tone. What dialogue there is in this first act tends to be pithy hot that can work just as well as intertitles in a silent movie; They serve more as garnings for what is already conveyed by the sharp instincts in the film’s largely excellent role. It is when the characters have much more to say later that the movie starts to vacate.
Not every good hunting movie starts with the self already going on, but it is usually a good way to lock in the viewers. And then it is possible that “Tornado” opens in Media Res, since the title character (Kôki), a young Japanese woman, strikes across fields in what informs us is somewhere on the British Isles in 1790 (the film is largely managed near Carlops in the Scottish Borders area in Scotland). She has quickly followed by a running younger boy (Nathan Malone), as if persecuted by the same who has not yet seen in the unbroken opening shot that introduces everyone’s back before their faces. And certainly enough, in the frame, a group of much older men will soon be going fast rather than running.
This gang is led by Sugarman (Tim Roth), with other remarkable players in the group including Sugarman’s defiant adult son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), the high kitten (Rory McCann), suggested to be the second-in-command, the lone gun certificate in a group whose weapons are mostly knives and arrows (Jack Morris as octopus lips), and a band that seems to be there just to play music on his paths. They chase both tornado and the boy, although the girl seems to be greater concern. After her to a country house just outside some forests, the gang harasses the inhabitants and is divided over the property. This will be one of the few inner scenes over the relatively short driving time, as most of Maclean’s film is in nature far away from cities or villages.
Previously teased with the odd dialogue line, it is specific that Tornado is chased out eventually in a flashback that spells everything in explicit detail, which means that we are a bit to do except to suck up the film’s style – and compare it with Maclean’s previous works.
In the lead role Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee as an odd couple who navigated in the American West to look for a woman with a win on the head, “Slow West”, visually stood out as a neo-Western with her deeply saturated colors and carefully designed sets that made comparisons with Wes Anderson. While some of the spiritual flowers remain in the editing of some violent meetings in “Tornado”, Maclean and his recurring kinematographer Robbie Ryan get rich results from going in the opposite direction to “Slow West”, but while they avoid the way for total desatation.
If “slow west” ran warm, “tornado” goes cold. It is a movie of fog, clay, icy rain and dying grass, with Ryan who found a kind of beauty in the miserable weather – something he had previously achieved with Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” (2011), although Tornado’s Widescreen frames are a long crying from the narrow 1,37: 1 Action Jump.
With regard to the Widescreen images, one of the film’s more convincingly recurring properties is to deliver a narrow close-up of one or two faces, followed by a cut to a shot that shows much more of the given environment, but where an important part of physical action occurs at a very long distance from the camera. These are often showers of violence, with the most striking example where a man suddenly stings another on top of a hill. Despite the scene that takes place during the day, the darkness works in the cloudy sky and the distance from the camera from the change to make the men look like struggling silhouettes or shadow dolls projected on the landscape.
For a while, “Tornado” thrives for a moment of the news in transplanting both Western and Samurai film Tropes to a British landscape, plus the rare cinematic depiction of an Asian immigrant experience in the UK. But it is in the expansion of details after the early sections where Maclean struggles. While Hira – a new Emmy -Nominated to “Shogun” – is in typically strong form, his part is loaded with the film’s clumsy dialogue, with his wise words, Verbatim is repeated by Tornado in the third act when she becomes the hunter herself.
Elsewhere, some narrative by, probably intended to make the film’s world feel bigger than just this story, ultimately be distracting semi -baked. There are consequences for the two central fathers until the paragraph has collided in the past, although the more scrubbing examples of tangential threads concern an executed squad that Tornado has an existing relationship. But it also turns out that Sugarman has history with them as well, especially Joanne Whally’s character Crawford, whose main function in the film ends vaguely referring to back stories and previous tensions for everyone else – details that ultimately do not enrich the experience in any significant way. A particularly crazy example: After Sugarman finds the body of a deceased comrade, he mutters something to the effect of “This country would go to hell if it wasn’t for men like you and me.” Very little of what Maclean has shown us throughout the movie helps this explanation to make sense or have any weight.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” is a movie whose smallest details and support characters successfully convey a world that extends beyond the limits of the specific story being told. A lot of decisive importance is conveyed much of that information in suit and production design, rather than dialogue on your own. But it is also to admit how to thread the needle between archetype and specificity. Despite significant tensions throughout, Maclean’s writers make it seem that his characters were actually never in their world before the film began.
Rating: B-
“Tornado” premiered at Glasgow Film Festival 2025. It is currently seeking US distribution.
Want to keep you updated on IndieWire’s movie Reviews And critical thoughts? Subscribe here To our recently launched newsletter, in review by David Ehrlich, where our main film critic and Head Review’s editor rounds off the best new reviews and streaming choices along with some exclusive Musings – all only available for subscribers.
