The Assassin (2015)
Set in the fractured political landscape of ninth-century Tang dynasty China, The Assassin arrives from Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien as something of a career left turn: a wuxia film from a director whose reputation rests almost entirely on quiet, rigorously observed dramas of everyday Taiwanese life. The film follows Nie Yinniang, abducted as a child and trained by a Taoist nun to become a weapon of political necessity, then sent back to her homeland with orders to kill a cousin she was once promised to. It is a premise that sits comfortably within the wuxia tradition, part martial arts film, part dynastic drama, and part meditation on loyalty and belonging, though the proportions in which Hou mixes those elements are, to say the least, unusual. The film premiered at Cannes in 2015, where Hou took the Best Director prize, which tells you something about where its priorities lie: this is a filmmaker's film, awarded by filmmakers, and the distance between that world and a standard Saturday-night action picture is considerable.
The screenplay, written by Chu Tien-Wen, Hou himself, and Hsieh Hai-Meng, draws on a short story from the classical Tang collection Chuanqi, filtered through Hou's characteristic concern with ellipsis and restraint. Chu Tien-Wen has been Hou's principal collaborator for decades, her scripts consistently trusting silence and implication over exposition, and that sensibility runs through every scene here. The production brought together a genuinely international coalition of studios across Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and France, which partly explains the scale and polish of the finished film, even as its soul remains resolutely personal and small-scale. The cast centres on Shu Qi as Yinniang, a role that demands physical precision and emotional containment in equal measure, with Chang Chen as her target and Ni Dahong, Zhou Yun, and Satoshi Tsumabuki in strong supporting roles across what is, for a hundred-and-five-minute film, a surprisingly large and carefully arranged ensemble.
Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing, another long-term Hou collaborator (the two worked together on Flowers of Shanghai and Flight of the Red Balloon), shoots the film in the Academy ratio, a deliberate and somewhat pointed choice for a genre that usually breathes wide. The result is a film that often resembles a series of hanging scrolls: figures in silk robes placed against mist, forest, and candlelight, landscapes of Hubei and the Chinese interior rendered with a stillness that is at once genuinely beautiful and occasionally airless. Composer Lim Giong layers traditional instrumentation against ambient texture, the score sparse and atmospheric rather than propulsive, more inclined to underscore mood than to drive momentum. Editors Liao Ching-sung and Huang Chih-chia cut the film with long, unhurried takes, favouring the accumulation of atmosphere over conventional scene-to-scene drive. The action sequences, when they arrive, are choreographed with an almost geometric elegance, precise and brief, offering a striking contrast to the languor of the surrounding material. For points of comparison on quite different approaches to the wuxia form, see also Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a film that casts a long shadow over this one, and I also covered Edward Yang's Yi Yi, another Taiwanese film of the same era that trusts the audience's patience to similar, if very different, ends.
The Assassin wants very badly to be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and it wears that ambition openly, perhaps too openly, because it spends much of its running time chasing the same lyrical, painterly brand of wuxia.
It is the tale of a trained female assassin sent to kill a man she shares a history with, and visually it is ravishing. The trouble is that it is in no hurry whatsoever to actually get going.
That is the central sticking point. For a film that runs only a hundred and five minutes, it takes an extraordinary amount of time to find its feet. A good third of it is given over to simply setting the scene, all mood and atmosphere and not much else, and for a film called The Assassin, the thing most of us have turned up for, the action, does not arrive until the second third. By the time it did, a fair chunk of my patience had already drained away.
What saves it from being a chore is how gorgeous it is to look at. The scenery and the cinematography are undeniably beautiful, some of the loveliest images I have seen in a wuxia film, and the acting is perfectly fine throughout. And when the fights finally come, they land: the choreography is precise and elegant, worth the price of admission on its own. There is a very good film buried somewhere in here.
The frustration is that you have to wade through so much to reach it. I rate Crouching Tiger highly, flaws and all, because for all its own languor it never forgets to move you. The Assassin borrows the beauty and the stillness but not quite the emotional pull, and I came away wishing it had spent rather less time being beautiful and rather more being gripping. Three stars, a sumptuous, patience-testing film that is worth it for the craft, if you have the stamina for the long build.
The Assassin is the kind of film that generates real disagreement, not because it is flawed in obvious ways but because the flaw and the virtue are the same thing: an uncompromising commitment to mood over momentum. Whether that trade-off pays off will depend almost entirely on what you are willing to bring to it. Hou Hsiao-hsien has made, by any reasonable measure, a polished but demanding piece of work, one that wears its Cannes pedigree on its sleeve and occasionally uses it as an excuse to linger past the point of necessity. For a companion piece in a looser, stranger corner of Chinese genre cinema, my review of The Boxer's Omen is worth a look, and if slow-burn art-house patience is your particular interest, I also wrote about Memoria, another festival-circuit film that makes the audience earn its pleasures. The Assassin is, without question, something to be seen. Whether it is something to be enjoyed is, honestly, a separate question.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2026-10-07
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Assassin (2015) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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