The Assassin has plot, but really only in the most technical sense of term. There is an action-and-consequence set of events. The characters remain the same from scene to scene, and move linearly forward through time. But what happens on screen and what the film is about are two wholly different beasts. What happens onscreen is nothing much at all. Characters in opulent dens hold endless conversations. Fights that are choreographed to an inch, but over practically before they begin. What the film is about is staring into a meadow and noticing varying hues of green. Or losing your shit while watching fog dance over a lake. What the film is about is reverie.

Hou’s longtime muse Shu Qi stars as Nie Yinniang, a young noble kidnapped as a child and trained to be a killer. We first meet her and her kidnapper come den-mother, the religious zealot Jiaxing (Sheu Fang-Yi), in a black and white prologue. Sent to dispatch of a cruel local warlord, Nie Yinniang is somehow unable to go through with the task, though we don’t know why. As punishment, or perhaps as a chance for redemption (or maybe something entirely else — there’s plenty left opaque here) Nie Yinniang is offered a new mission. She is to return to the home she was abducted from, integrate back into her family and kill the man she was once set to marry, the local Governor Tian Ji’an (fellow Hou veteran Chang Chen).

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