Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
9th century China. Ten year old general’s daughter Nie Yinniang is abducted by a nun who initiates her into the martial arts, transforming her into an exceptional assassin charged with eliminating cruel and corrupt local governors. One day, having failed in a task, she is sent back by her mistress to the land of her birth, with orders to kill the man to whom she was promised – a cousin who now leads the largest military region in North China. After 13 years of exile, the young woman must confront her parents, her memories and her long-repressed feelings.
Hou Hsiao-hsien's wuxia film is a singular, visually ravishing work shot in stunning Academy ratio with breathtaking landscapes and silks. Its cinematography by Mark Lee Ping-bing is genuinely extraordinary — among the finest of the decade. Novelty is equally high: no other martial arts film operates at this register of elliptical minimalism, poetic abstraction, and deliberate withholding. However, the plot is famously opaque to the point of near-inaccessibility — character motivations and political intrigues are so compressed that narrative coherence suffers genuinely, not just stylistically. The ending resolves little and leaves most audiences cold, functioning more as fadeout than culmination. Acting is understated and controlled, appropriate to the film's register but not a standout element.