Tornado (dir. John Maclean)

by Jack Martin | Jun 15, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 91 mins

UK Distributor: Lionsgate

UK Release Date: 13 June 2025

WHO’S IN TORNADO?

Kōki, Jack Lowden, Takehiro Hira, Tim Roth, Joanne Whalley, Douglas Russell, Jack Morris, Alex Macqueen, Dennis Okwera, Nathan Malone

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

John Maclean (director, writer), Leonora Darby, James Harris and Mark Lane (producers), Jed Kurzel (composer), Robbie Ryan (cinematographer), Selina Macarthur and Ryan Morrison (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

In 1790s Britain, a criminal gang hunts a thieving young samurai (Kōki)…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON TORNADO?

A tornado, by definition, is a destructive vortex of violently rotating winds that causes almost anything in its path to become completely devastated, sometimes beyond repair. It’s therefore quite bold of writer-director John Maclean to name his latest film Tornado, when in fact it’s much more of a light breeze than something truly cataclysmic.

Maclean’s return to filmmaking after a ten-year break, after his 2015 feature debut Slow West, is at once both ambitious and unambitious, beginning with a promising genre and style mish-mash before settling into something less interesting than it ought to be, and not quite working as well as the initial hook suggests. However, it features some utterly stunning production values that, if nothing else, carry the film toward its somewhat underwhelming end goal.

Set in 1790 somewhere within the remote British highlands, the film tells the story of Tornado (Kōki), a young Japanese woman travelling with her father Fujin (Takehiro Hira), a former swordsman turned puppeteer who delights audiences with violent samurai tales. However, the father and daughter are inadvertently drawn into the crossfires of a ruthless gang, led by Sugarman (Tim Roth) and featuring his abused offspring Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), when a young pickpocket (Nathan Malone) makes off with two bags of their stolen gold during one of their shows, and long story short Tornado is left running for her life from the gang who’s desperate to retrieve their ill-gotten gains. Eventually, though, Tornado finds it within her to exact brutal revenge on the gangsters, in pure samurai fashion.

As with his previous film, Maclean shows himself to be an odd filmmaker. He can more or less maintain a consistent tone, while also working in some light pathos every now and then, but for the most part – and especially in Tornado – he manages to make a promising concept feel rather mundane in its overall execution. Here, the mashup of both Western and samurai genres, mixing the imagery of Sergio Leone with the drawn-out atmosphere of Akira Kurosawa, creates a strange and borderline absurdist environment that lacks the energy needed to make things truly pop. Characters often speak in very dry monotone, though there already isn’t much dialogue to speak of until nearer the end of the first act (more on which in a bit), and the performances are curiously muted, with not one member of the cast, including lead Kōki who has a credible screen presence but otherwise struggles with giving life to a rather blandly-conceived role, standing out among the rest.

Maclean’s film also suffers from pacing issues, which further prevent Tornado from being the force of nature its very title suggests. The filmmaker is clearly opting for a slow-burn narrative here, much like Leone and Kurosawa often applied to their range of classics, but it does little to engage the audience, especially when it unnecessarily opens with the second act, which finds Tornado herself already on the run from Tim Roth and his band of cronies.

Of course, the film eventually flashes back to preceding events – and if there’s one positive I can give the film, it at least avoids the increasingly tired “one day earlier” trope that even Sinners was guilty of doing – but in this case, the non-linear approach ends up having no effect, for you feel very little about the story or its characters in that opening stretch, and once you see the events that kick-started everything, you end up caring even less. That’s because Maclean isn’t able to designate anyone as a sympathetic figure, not even his titular lead who at first comes off more as a sullen teenager than a compelling protagonist, which further widens the disconnect between the filmmaker and his audience, who need at least someone to develop an attachment to, and are largely denied that in this fittingly bleak world.

If the narrative isn’t strong enough to support interest, then the visuals certainly are, for Tornado boasts some striking cinematography by Robbie Ryan that showcase Maclean’s inspirations better than the actual story and characters. The film deploys plenty of tight close-up shots within a gentle wide-angle lens that, similar to what you’d find in a Sergio Leone film, create an eerie otherworldly feel that amplifies the harsh brutality of this universe, especially when said close-ups are that of lifeless corpses left to rot in the vast countryside hills. The cinematographer also captures some beautifully atmospheric and sometimes sun-drenched shots of characters tracing up and down and sometimes through these highlands where even the most faraway locations and characters give vibes that are way more epic than they might actually be, as does the (sadly fleeting) splattering violence which in true Tarantino form is exaggerated to the point of cartoonishness, and is also one of the few times where the film actually embraces its genre mixing.

It is such a fantastically shot movie that it almost makes up for the fact that Tornado, for all its promise as a Western/samurai homage set in late 18th century England, is a rather disappointing gentle gust than the true force that its title suggests. Its intentions are clear, and there are even moments when you could almost have fun with some of its genre excursions, but Maclean’s strangely underplayed approach leaves you nowhere near as invested in the narrative as he may have hoped, which for a project with such an intriguing conceptual hook is an unfortunate missed opportunity.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Tornado boasts some striking cinematography by Robbie Ryan, but beyond that the film is a disappointingly unengaging genre mish-mash that is muted by filmmaker John Maclean’s oddly stifled approach.