The Assassin (2015)
Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien
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.
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What critics compared The Assassin to
Seven years in the making, it integrates wuxia visual tropes into his own aesthetic while avoiding the lyrical metaphysics of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or packaging them into splendorous global entertainments like Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers.
Other modern wuxia classics like House of Flying Daggers, Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon were all veritable black belts in balancing artfulness and epic action.
The sheer depth of its formal artistry places “The Assassin” in a rather more rarefied realm than not only the classic action epics of King Hu and their ilk, but also popular hits like Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” (2002) and “House of Flying Daggers” (2004), and Wong Kar-wai’s “The Grandmaster” (2013), to name the most prominent recent examples of revered Asian auteurs making rare and overdue forays into martial-arts cinema.