China in the 8th century. The Tang Dynasty is crumbling, territorial governors are rising against the Emperor. Nie Yin-Niang was trained to be a professional killer in a Taoist monastery. She gets a mission from the emperor loyal “nun” to kill her cousin Liu Lang, the son of the sister’s emperor’s husband and a concubine, who has switched sides and is now a renegade. Liu Lang and Nie Yin-Niang were once promised to each other before Liu was married to someone else for tactical reasons…the relationships in THE ASSASSIN are as interlaced and impervious as the rooms in the film are opulently staged, which director Hou Hsiao-Hsien furnishes with layers upon layers of curtains, doors, and room dividers. Layers of historical layers of loyalty, betrayal, love, and kinship seem to weigh on the characters, they tie and crush them. Nie Yin-Niang must find her way in this thicket, reminiscent of Taiwan’s relationship to China.
The floating Wuxia film THE ASSASSIN from arthouse master Hou Hsiao-Hsien whisks you away to a place with hypnotically beautiful images and filigree interiors which look like an overflowing jewelry case, with color-saturated materials, monochromatic landscapes that look like Chinese ink drawings, mountain panoramas in shades of grey, and endless birch forests. The gently floating camera connects disparate places and images which combine to make a flood of images that are continuously interrupted and sped up by short, staccato-like martial arts sequences before finding itself back in the calmer waters, like stream after an obstacle.

Hendrike Bake

Translation: Elinor Lewy