TORNADO (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Tornado, Independent Film Company

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 29, 2025

There might be only one truly good person in Tornado, and it's perhaps telling that director John Maclean's screenplay is arranged in such a way that said character is dead when the film begins. All of the other characters are out for themselves, scrambling for a couple sacks filled with gold and not caring who is hurt or killed in the hunt for that wealth.

Plot-wise, then, this is an incredibly simple film—so much so that Maclean can start it all with an extended chase and game of cat-and-mouse without establishing any context for the pursued or the pursuers. All we know is that Tornado (Kōki,), a young Japanese woman in Britain in the late 18th century, is on the run through the countryside and the forest. Also fleeing is a young unnamed boy (played by Nathan Malone), although he doesn't seem to with Tornado or vice versa, since the two don't acknowledge each other and take separate paths within the first few shots of the film.

Chasing them are a gang of criminals, led by a man we'll soon know to be the notorious outlaw Sugarman (Tim Roth) and with a membership comprising several good mugs (including those of Rory McCann, as a somewhat gentle giant of a thief, and Bryan Michael Mills, as a man who clearly would rather be a musician than a criminal). Yes, Maclean clears up much of who these characters are, why they're chasing after or running from each other, what all of them want, and how it all came to this.

What's impressive about the first sequence of the film, however, is the way the filmmaker throws us straight into it and still manages to make everything but the minute details perfectly clear. That's one of the benefits of telling a simple story, of course, but it doesn't make the accomplishment of an introduction any less impressive.

The matter of the chase, obviously, is just one of staging and editing, but the rest of the storytelling of this prologue comes down to archetypes and little, wordless pieces of business. We know, for example, that Tornado is our protagonist, simply because she's outsider to this place and a young woman, and we know the villains are the villains because of the way they dress and, on occasion, speak while they're pursuing their target.

Maclean includes a little but significant moment, too, to let us know just how ruthless and desperate our key bad guy is. While in the middle of the hunt, Sugarman pauses with his men, starts walking toward and calls the name of one of his underlings, and slashes the man's throat as he passes. If he can and will do this in such an off-handed way to one of this own, what could and would he do to Tornado if he and his men find and catch her?

The point of describing what really is a straightforward kind of foot chase isn't to suggest it's a novel or revolutionary kind of sequence. No, it's simply to point out that Maclean knows exactly the kind of story he's telling, is casually confident in telling it, and shows us that we don't need too much within a story to become invested in it, its characters, and its broader ideas about humanity. The introductory chase is vital to the film's success, not only on its own, but also to put us on the story's basic but skillful wavelength.

More, of course, is revealed after Tornado evades Sugarman and most of his cohorts. The exception is the crime boss' adult son, who's still referred to by the father and the rest of the gang as Little Sugar (Jack Lowden)—a moniker he now resents but that does a lot of heavy lifting to inform us that the not-so-little-anymore guy has been in this crooked business for most, if not all, of his life.

He finds Tornado, hiding in a manor past the woods, and offers her a deal that sounds more like an ultimatum. If she tells him where the gold is, he won't tell the gang where she is. Tornado's too smart for that, though, and the rest of the story is akin to that opening chase, only slowed down, with a lot more context about these characters and their goals, and possessing a growing sense of just how useless the greed shared to some degree by all of these characters is. A simple story, after all, deserves a simple moral to go along with it, but because of the limited scope of this tale, that theme feels as if it hangs over every little and major moment of the film.

An equally extended flashback set the scene post-prologue, showing Tornado as a bored puppeteer, traveling the country with her father Fujin (Takehiro Hira), who tries to teach his daughter about patience and being attentive. She has other plans in mind, though, and that's how Tornado and the boy become targets of Sugarman and his gang, a few of whom stop to watch Fujin's show while carrying the gold to a safe location. By the end of it, the story is back where it began, but now we know how much pain and misery these characters' greed has caused, as well as how much more is in store as every main character attempts to find and keep the gold.

It's easy to become caught up in this tale—not because it is filled with rich characters and explores its ideas in complex ways. Quite the contrary, Tornado is effective because it's a clean and uncomplicated story, told with efficiency and proficiency, about corrupt people, the wages of their ill deeds, and how our protagonist learns there must be an end to more than the chase.

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