Producers: Leonora Darby, James Harris and Mark Lane   Director: John Maclean   Screenplay: John Maclean   Cast: Kōki (Mitsuki Kimura), Tim Roth, Jack Lowden, Takehiro Hira, Rory McCann, Raphaël Thiéry, Alex Macqueen, Jack Morris, Dennis Okwera, Jamie Michie, Bryan Mills, Ian Hanmore, Douglas Russell, Sammy Heyman, Joanne Whalley and Nathan Malone   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: C

Scottish writer-director John Maclean, whose first feature was the aptly titled “Slow West” (2015), a beautifully filmed but languid tale of death on the American prairie in the late nineteenth century, again joins forces with cinematographer Robbie Ryan to craft a visually evocative period piece, another study of a violent society this time set in the rural Britain of 1790.  Like the previous film “Tornado” is a deliberately paced story punctuated by bursts of brutal action, gorgeous to look at but dramatically rather thin.

Like “Slow West” it’s also a chase film, beginning with the frantic pursuit of a young Japanese girl—the titular heroine, played by model and songwriter Kōki—by a band of bandits headed by the ruthless Sugarman (Tim Roth) and including his son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden) and a group of thugs with nicknames like Kitten (Roy McCann), Archer (Jamie Michie), Squid Lips (Jack Morris), Lazy Legs (Douglas Russell) and Psycho (Dennis Okwera).  Tornado is also being trailed by a young boy (Nathan Malone), a thief himself.  The two break into the house of an aristocrat (Alex Macqueen), which Sugarman and his crew trash searching for her in a sequence that blends suspense, nastiness and some bleak humor.

The reason behind all this is revealed later in flashbacks—Maclean’s script loves chronological shifts.  Tornado and her rigid father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) were touring the countryside giving puppet shows for the locals, in which their marionette samurai fought duels with swords that ended with them coming from behind the curtain to close with a battle they staged between themselves.  During a performance Tornado noticed the boy stealing two bags that Sugarman’s men had put down while watching the show, so she took them from the kid and stored them in the undercarriage of the horse-drawn wagon that served as their mobile home and theatre: the bags contained gold coins, the gang’s recent loot.

Unfortunately, Sugarman’s band caught up with them, and Fujin was killed in the ensuing confrontation, though he managed to wound Sugarman before expiring.  Tornado fled, the boy following her, and the gang pursuing them both after failing to find the bags in the wagon.  There’s a wrinkle here, however: Little Sugar, tired of taking orders from his father, plans to take the gold himself, which requires him to catch Tornado first and force her to admit where she’d hidden the stash.

The pursuit leads Tornado to seek shelter with Mint (Raphaël Thiéry), the strongman in the travelling circus run by Vienna Crawford (Joanne Whalley) in which she and her father had previously been players.  But Sugarman and his crew follow her there and terrorize the troupe.  Again the girl escapes, returning to the wagon to bury her father and find the gold.  Meanwhile Sugarman and Little Sugar have had a face-off that turns deadly.

Now the hunted becomes the hunter as Tornado seeks vengeance on Sugarman and his crew.  One by one she takes on the men who lie in wait for her.  The outcome is predictable, and the staging of the individual clashes surprisingly unimaginative. 

With “Tornado” Maclean demonstrates again that he has a distinctive voice and that, working with Ryan and his other craft collaborators—production designer Elizabeth El-Kadhi, costumer Kirsty Halliday, editors Ryan Morrison and Selina Macarthur, composer Jed Kurzel—he can evoke a world palpably different from ours.  Yet that world has an artificial feel, and the people inhabiting in it equally so.  Partially that’s because they’re thinly written, more sketches than rounded characters.  But it also results from the fact that the acting is, for the most part, pretty rudimentary, even from veterans like Roth and Lowden but more noticeably in the supporting cast.

And Kōki is a special case.  She certainly looks the part, and there are moments when she connects emotionally.  But too often her performance seems halting and uncertain, as if Maclean were directing her as Hitchcock is reputed to have directed Kim Novak in “Vertigo,” trying to control every gesture and movement.  The result is a turn that’s at times affecting, but only sporadically convincing. Her last-act swordsmanship is at best adequate.

In the end “Tornado” is, like “Slow West,” impressive in spurts but odd and ultimately unsatisfying as a whole.