The Assassin (2015)

The Assassin arrives from 2015 with the calm of a museum piece that has never once been asked to justify itself. Hou Hsiao-hsien takes the ninth-century tale of Nie Yinniang and strips the wuxia genre down to fabric, candlelight, and long silences. A woman trained from childhood to kill corrupt governors is sent home to murder the cousin she was once promised to. That is the plot. The film is mostly interested in the space between the plot and the silk curtain.

A female assassin at the center of a martial arts epic might look, from a distance, like an argument about something. It is not. Nie Yinniang's gender is a fact of the source material, a ninth-century short story by Pei Xing. The film treats it the way it treats the weather: present, unremarked, and not up for discussion. The political struggles here are dynastic and feudal. Nobody is dismantling an empire of capital or delivering a speech about it. The cast is entirely East Asian because the story takes place during the Tang dynasty, which is a form of historical accuracy and not a casting initiative. The film's convictions, such as they are, live in the framing of a doorway.

The result is a work of enormous formal control and almost no messaging. It won Hou the Best Director prize at Cannes and topped the Sight & Sound poll for 2015, which suggests the critical establishment will reward patience even when the audience is left holding a beautiful, empty vase. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no posture. It is a film about a woman deciding not to kill a man, filmed as though that decision were the quietest event in Chinese history. We classify it accordingly, and we find nothing to classify.