Killing

In the middle of the nineteenth century, near the end of two hundred and fifty years of peace, a masterless samurai lives in a village helping farmers and practising with his sword as if it were a game. Then a master arrives to recruit him for the fighting in Edo, and the practice acquires a purpose. Shinya Tsukamoto's real question is what a man this skilled does when he actually has to put a blade into a person. The young man at the centre does not kill. He cannot. And that incapacity makes him not a hero but the cause of the disaster. Tsukamoto directs and plays the master himself, with Sosuke Ikematsu as the young samurai. The fights are short, ugly and loud, with handheld camera and breathing drowning out everything else. It screened in the main competition at the seventy fifth Venice film festival. The difficulty is that it runs eighty minutes, is deliberately ragged and offers no satisfying close. Who it is for: viewers who want the samurai film read backwards. Who it is not for: anyone expecting choreography and triumph.