Artsy Review - The Assassin

This is not the review any of you were ever expecting, considering this came out in 2015 and I could be reviewing Wonder Woman 1984 or Promising Young Woman right now. But when I got SBS World Movies on my computer, I found this movie on it, and also found this movie ranked the 50th best movie of the 21st century according to the BBC. Tempted, I plunged in, and I can say that I certainly understand why people would call this among the best of the decade. For me personally, though…no.

So The Assassin doesn’t really have a simple straightforward narrative or dialogue. Rather, it tells a lot of its story through visuals, with the main plot (I think) being an assassin sent to kill her cousin, lord of a rogue province in Medieval China. Really, that’s all I can summate for this film’s plot, and if you look on the Wikipedia page, they can’t really do a whole lot more.

This movie is a Taiwanese martial arts (wuxia) film from Hou Hsiao-Hsien, one of the more respected filmmakers in arthouse circles around the world. He and his movies are so arty that he even makes films in French (Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge) and wrote the introduction to this film in French, despite my version being an SBS subtitling. So if you’re really into arthouse stuff, this movie could be right up your alley…but I am not that.

Let’s first get my praises for this movie out of the way. It is a gorgeous looking movie, so breathtakingly blocked and full of colour that it looked like a painting at many points. The production, the sets, the costumes – it all looked fantastic. I also really liked the use of diegetic sound without a lot of music.

Another thing I can at least praise for the attempt is visual storytelling. This movie has so little dialogue (I’ll get to that in a tic) as it is trying to tell a story like a silent performance, as to allow the audience to soak in the emotion. I like this approach to the filmmaking, and it works intermittently.

And the actors are fine in their roles. But that’s weirdly where the praise ends for me. I was expecting a lot more from this movie (maybe my fault), but I strangely found a lot I actively disliked.

Returning to that visual storytelling, that only works if anything actually happens in your movie. Except nothing really does happen (at least onscreen). The vast majority of scenes in this movie are either wide shots of people sitting in silence staring at each other with the same slightly scowling expression. I couldn’t tell what emotion I was supposed to be feeling, and arguably the most important script elements – background context, dialogue, character chemistry – are only referenced in passing dialogue like deleted scenes.

Characterization in this film is utterly non-existent. I already said everyone maintains the same facial expression, but no-one actually goes anywhere in this film in terms of character development. There are two main characters who are supposed to have been in love at one point, but it’s never really communicated that they have a relationship beyond passing dialogue. And some people in this movie just appear and disappear without any story context whatsoever, like Irrfan Kahn in The Amazing Spider-Man.

As for that dialogue, if you took all the scenes with any dialogue and put them end to end, you’d get 5 minutes of movie. And none of it is interesting, funny or dramatically impactful (in English at least – if I knew Mandarin, they were probably all savagely roasting each other). Watching the lifeless visual storytelling and the nothing dialogue, the only conclusion I can really draw from this film’s story was that Medieval China was the most boring culture on Earth.

And pacing-wise, this movie is messy as hell. It’s 105 minutes long, short for this kind of epic, but it feels like 3 hours. The nothingness that pervades this movie makes the entire film a glacial slog, but the short runtime could easily have been extended with scenes that provide character context and break up the nothing.

So, this is a wuxia film, and I have to talk fight scenes. They are acceptable, with one great fight in a forest in the end, but they never feel immersed in the story. They feel like deviations, as the movie gives no solid context for what is occurring, and the audience has no idea what is happening. That fight in the forest is between the lead and a character literally seen once in the whole movie, in a scene where we learned nothing about her identity.

Before I conclude, I know what some may think. Because this is a movie that’s so unconventional, it could be argued that the movie is not a story, but merely something to experience like a VR game. I would argue in return that the inclusion of a story with dramatic elements undermines that argument, and that the experience is let down by bad pacing and poor storytelling.

I have to mention one last thing before my grade. In the final scene of the movie, before the end credits started, this weird music started playing (there’s not that much music in the movie). I can only describe it as…dubstep shamisen?

I fully checked out after that. It was bad music, and completely incongruous to the tone of the rest of the movie. It’s exactly like Event Horizon, where it goes from brutal horror to sudden EDM credits music (wow, I’d watch Event Horizon over this, that’s something).

I’m going to give The Assassin a C.

Not worth it. There are many better wuxia films out there, like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Shadow, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Ip Man, The Grandmaster etc. Maybe the experience of this movie could be great in a big cinema, but on my laptop, the cracks in the construction really showed.