Style Is Substance In 'The Assassin'

The Assassin is not a typical period piece kung fu movie. While on the surface it might look like Zhang Yimou's Hero or House of Flying Daggers, the tone and substance of director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's work is far different. Instead of fantastical wire-fu fight scenes and kaleidoscopic melodrama, the focus here is highly-tuned to visual composition, landscape and lyrical story-telling.

Think of The Assassin like a filmmaker's homage to scroll paintings -- the experience of the story comes through visual style. Here, the narrative centers on a highly-skilled killer, played by the stunning Qi Shu, who's tasked with knifing the man she was promised to as as child. Having been abducted as a girl and brought up like a robot ninja, the assassin must choose between her humanity or the cold-blooded creed of her order, which is dedicated to snuffing out corrupt politicians.

Yet, the story, which is spiced with political tension, palace intrigue and black magic, is hard to grasp. That'd be a significant problem had the movie been just pretty, or even reminiscent of Yimou's works mentioned above. But The Assassin achieves a level of visual poetics that goes beyond comparison. It looks absolutely mythical. There's hardly any added computerized glitter. Instead, Hsiao-Hsien takes landscapes, immaculate sets and gorgeous costumes and creates a 9th Century China that feels as fantastic as it does real.

In some sense, this is what a martial arts film would look like directed by Werner Herzog. Shots are hardly ever zoomed-in to characters' faces, instead we see them as part of breathing, flowing, natural world. As such, the wind in the curtains or the distant mountains achieve an almost character-level status. While the film is indeed slow -- you may even nod off -- The Assassin is at moments so stunning in its uniqueness, so absorbing in its beauty that it doesn't really matter. Hsiao-Hsien has crafted images of legend. They cut deep.

The Assassin is playing at the Lagoon Cinema.