The Assassin

Hou Hsiao-hsien has spent a career filming people in rooms, waiting. The Assassin is his martial arts film, and he has made the genre wait too. It is set in ninth-century Weibo, a province slipping from the Tang court’s grip, and its story is the form’s oldest: a trained killer sent home to murder the man she was once meant to marry. It is among the handsomest films we have seen in years, and for long stretches we could not have told you what was happening. We recommend it warmly, with that caveat attached.

Mark Lee Ping-Bing shoots the opening from a distance. Yinniang kills a man on horseback with a single stroke and is gone before the body has finished falling. Then she crouches in the rafters above a governor playing with his son, and does not do it. Lee sits the camera far back from the governor’s hall and lets silk curtains blow across the lens, so half of every conversation is seen through a veil with a wind in it. Outdoors he waits on lakes, birch woods and mountains half lost in cloud.

Huang Wen-ying designed both sets and clothes, which is why they agree. Shu Qi spends the film in the same dark tunic, so that in a lit room she is a gap in it. Lim Giong’s score is mostly a drum struck at long intervals; the rest is birds, wind and floorboards. A woman plays a zither and tells a story about a bluebird that danced itself to death before a mirror, and it moved us more than a story about a bird had any right to. It was the framing that did it: Sheu Fang-Yi held dead centre, the instrument, the fingers, and no cut for what felt like minutes.

Shu Qi says perhaps thirty lines. She plays Yinniang as someone trained out of wanting anything who is finding, uncomfortably, that something is still there; you see it in how long she watches before she decides. Chang Chen gives Tian Ji’an a nervous vanity, a man who shouts at his court and goes quiet with his concubine. Satoshi Tsumabuki turns up as the Mirror Polisher, who cannot understand a word anyone says, which puts him about level with the audience.

The fights are over in seconds. Yinniang meets a masked woman in the birch wood, they exchange perhaps eight strokes, something is cut, and the film goes back to looking at the trees. A raid on a camp is shown from a hillside, in one wide shot, the way a passer-by would see it. Anyone who came for wire-work and ten-minute duels will feel robbed; several critics did. We did not. Because these fights are never allowed to become entertainment, you flinch when the blade comes out.

The plot is another matter. It concerns who in Weibo is loyal to the court and who is poisoning whom, and the four credited writers have removed most of the sentences that would have told you. Liao Ching-sung and Huang Chih-chia cut scenes before the information has landed. We lost the thread around the forty-minute mark and found that we did not mind. A viewer who did mind would be furious, and the closing stretch feels longer than its 105 minutes.

Most critics have landed near where we have; the dissenters wanted a martial arts film and were handed a Hou film with swords in it. Against his own work it sits closest to Flowers of Shanghai, another film about power conducted in lit rooms, and a long way from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

See it on the largest screen you can; the mist and the candles are most of what it has to offer, and on a laptop they are wallpaper. The film is not keeping anything from you. It is simply not interested in telling you.