In The Assassin, martial arts movie starring Shu Qi, there’s no flying, or blood – Hou Hsiao-hsien’s take on wuxia has an air of realism to it

The action in The Assassin, which stars Shu Qi as a woman sent to kill a man she once loved, is very grounded and there is no flying or ‘zen leaping’

Japanese samurai films were a big influence on The Assassin – director Hou Hsiao-hsien enjoyed watching samurai films as much as he did wuxia films as a child

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Shu Qi in a still from The Assassin, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s wuxia film that doesn’t play out like a traditional wuxia movie.

Published: 4:15am, 7 Nov 2021

When Taiwanese art-house master Hou Hsiao-hsien decided to make a martial arts film, he decided to do it differently – his way.

Hou is known for his slow and naturalistic explorations of Taiwanese identity in films such as the 1989 masterpiece A City of Sadness, and he brought much of this movie-making style to 2015’s The Assassin.

The film features Shu Qi – the star of Hou’s Millennium Mambo (2001) and Three Times (2005) – as a Tang dynasty (618–907) assassin, trained by a nun, who is sent to kill a man she once loved as punishment for failing to assassinate a target because his son was present.

Hou’s film doesn’t play out like a traditional wuxia film, as the heroine does not adhere to the usual Confucian values. She does not revere her master, the nun, and she is not driven by a desire for justice. Instead, she promotes humanism – she does not want to kill – and she acts politically.

Hou has said in interviews that he decided to make the film about an assassin, rather than the typical chivalrous knight of wuxia films, because there are already many wuxia films that deal with traditional Confucian values.