Scottish director John Maclean’s second feature, TORNADO, opened the Glasgow Film Festival with its world premiere, showcasing the beauty of the Scottish landscape and the innovation of the Scottish film scene. TORNADO recontextualises and blends the tropes of American Westerns and Japanese samurai movies in an entertaining period thriller that dares to try something new.

TORNADO opens in medias res with a young woman running for her life through the Scottish hills in the 1790s. Her name is Tornado (Kōki,) and she is pursued by Sugarman (Tim Roth) and a gang of fierce-looking men striding menacingly across the moors. Sugarman is a local criminal who terrorises the area with his ruthless bandits, including his sly and ambitious son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden). It’s a scene not dissimilar from the famous opening line of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, leaning into the Western tropes from the very start of the film.

John Maclean’s direction establishes a real sense of place in the landscape. TORNADO was filmed on location in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh (even if the location isn’t explicitly established as such in the film), and there’s a definite sense of the landscape as a space where people live in myriad different ways, from the laird (Alex Macqueen) in his manor house to the travelling performers in their wagon camp on the other side of the loch. The geography of the space becomes very important for Tornado’s escape as the film establishes what she and Sugarman are both interested in. Maclean clearly establishes the geography of these hills, drawing out a sense of space through cinematography and dialogue.

“The soundscape of the film’s first scenes is dominated by the relentless whistling of wind around walls and windows and through the branches of the trees in the forest. Doors fly open as gusts catch them, and Tornado seems propelled across the landscape by the heavy winds.”

The soundscape of the film’s first scenes is dominated by the relentless whistling of wind around walls and windows and through the branches of the trees in the forest. Doors fly open as gusts catch them, and Tornado seems propelled across the landscape by the heavy winds. However, as we learn what happened to Tornado and her father (Takehiro Hira) and see the hardships of her pursuit forge her into something harder, the wind seems to converge into her, and she becomes the avenging tornado of her name.

In its final act, TORNADO subtly shifts genre, moving from the American Western inspired focus on the community terrorised by Sugarman and his bandits to the Japanese samurai movie story of Tornado’s revenge against the men who killed her father. TORNADO fully embraces samurai movie tropes with Akira Kurosawa-style arterial sprays, sword fights between determined and well-matched opponents, and a final showdown drenched in sorrowful inevitability.

TORNADO’s blending of genres is not always entirely successful, occasionally creating an uncanny feeling, and there are elements of the backstory that could have been left unsaid for the audience to imagine for themselves. But it’s a very entertaining film nonetheless, that isn’t afraid to proudly showcase its influences and try something new with them.