Vague Visages’ Tornado review contains minor spoilers. John Maclean’s 2025 movie features Jack Lowden as Little Sugar, Tim Roth as Sugarman and Rory McCann as Kitten. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Ten years after his stylishly subdued debut, Slow West (2015), John Maclean returns with another bloody tale set against a starkly beautiful backdrop. Tornado begins with its eponymous protagonist (played by Japanese songwriter Kōki) running through the British countryside. The landscape is a long way from the sprawling, sun-soaked plains of Maclean’s Western, its misty hills and dense forests calling for a murkier color pallete. But Maclean and cinematographer Robbie Ryan paint it in much the same way during Tornado, framing the scenery in elegant wide shots that call attention to its natural beauty and its sparseness. The film’s world is a gorgeous place, especially when the setting sun burnishes it in all orange-brown light and turns the characters into deep black silhouettes. But it’s permeated by a sense of vulnerability and danger too. 

Maclean’s affinity for these wild spaces remains intact and so does his penchant for minimalist storytelling. The writer-director reveals nothing about the title character when the film begins — where she’s coming from or where she’s going — but the amplified sound of her ragged breathing makes it clear that she is running for her life. This intuition is confirmed when a gang of men move behind her in a purposeful yet unhurried way. Using the simplest cinematic language, cutting steadily between the increasingly panicked title character and the men following her, Tornado taps straight into the audience’s reptile brains and makes the premise immediately clear: predators and prey. 

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It helps that Tim Roth plays a leader of predators, a bandit named Sugarman, and that Maclean imbues him with an unmistakable sense of menace and power. Even when the character is surrounded by much larger and better-armed men (the filmmaker once again taps his towering countryman Rory McCann to provide the muscle), there’s never any question about who is in charge. Sugarman has a gravitational pull about him, a force of personality that’s invisible yet undeniable.

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During the opening chase, Sugarman casually walks up to one of his henchmen and slits their throat. This is a pretty well-worn trope in action movies — the bad guy killing off one of his own to display his ruthlessness — but it happens so suddenly in Tornado (and with so little context) that it’s genuinely startling. It also clues viewers in to the sort of violence they can expect: quick, brutal and without real motivation… the violence of the wilderness.

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After the cold open, Tornado darts back in time to explain how the pursuit began. It’s revealed that Tornado and her father, Fujin (Takehiro Hira), are traveling performers who earn their keep by delighting small crowds with samurai stories. The duels they depict are full of gleefully gory effects, with torrents of fake blood exploding out in a grisly foreshadowing of what’s to come when Sugarman accuses them of stealing two bags of his (stolen) gold. The bandits attack, Tornado takes flight and she realizes that her only option is to draw her sword and fight.

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Tornado’s first and second act switcheroo feels a little contrived — an excuse to start the movie in a more action-packed place, although it might’ve been designed to ensure that viewers sympathize with Tornado, who turns out to be a bit of a brat with a ruthlessly selfish streak. She makes for a highly ignoble and perhaps even unlikable hero, but she might earn audience support due to her predicament. Regardless, the final third of Tornado is as straightforward as they come with the title character turning predators into prey as she draws her enemies into the woods and picks them off like a diminutive John Rambo.

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At this point, Tornado becomes a full-blown samurai movie. Like the westerns with which they share so much DNA, samurai films often have a way of elevating violence into something elegant, balletic and noble. And in Maclean’s version of a western, he allows for no such romanticization. The fights themselves are gruesome affairs, and even Tornado’s triumphs are tinged with a sense of melancholy. These are not the good-versus-evil tales that she and her father used to play-act — this is real violence. In Maclean’s movies, even righteous violence is a messy, sad affair.

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In fact, Tornado seems more comfortable as its close and nasty combat intensifies —  knives being shoved into bellies and that sort of thing. And the more over-the-top pieces involving lopped limbs and elaborate swordsmanship actually look a little hokey.

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Tornado may not mark a pronounced evolution from Slow West . In fact, Maclean’s debut feature may even be the slightly stronger of the two films. However, Tornado is thoroughly gripping, often gorgeous and altogether unique enough that fans can only desperately hope it doesn’t take another decade to see what else the writer-director can do.

Ross McIndoe (@OneBigWiggle) is a freelance writer based in Glasgow. Other bylines include The Skinny, Film School Rejects and Bright Wall/Dark Room.

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