Dull and impenetrable: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin reviewed

Fans of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon be warned: this is not that. Never have I watched a film where the title so belied the tone and pace of the story. For The Assassin is slow, glacially so, and although it really is exceptionally gorgeous to look at – every frame is a sort of cross between a Turner landscape and a Chinese handscroll, all silver birch horizons and Bacchic waterfalls – I expect a few too many ticket-buyers, enticed by rave reviews and the film’s director prize at last year’s Cannes, will be quite taken aback by how dull and impenetrable they find it.

That was not a flippant ‘all martial arts movies are the same’ reference to Crouching Tiger. Like that film, along with Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of the Flying Daggers, The Assassin belongs to the so-called Wuxia tradition, where itinerant swordsmen and practitioners of fantastical martial artistry roam old lands, righting wrongs and showing up the failings of local government.