“She wanted me to see her before she took my life” Without a doubt one of the most gorgeous films of 2015, Hsiao-Hsien Hou‘s 刺客聶隱娘 [Nie yin niang] [The Assassin] is also high on the list for most convoluted. I still have little clue about what happened throughout the story—based on a late ninth century short text by Xing Pei—besides the fact that the titular assassin (Qi Shu‘s Nie Yinniang) was tasked with killing her cousin Tian Ji’an (Chen Chang). Everything else on the periphery of that central plot deals…
Read MoreREVIEW: 刺客聶隱娘 [Nie yin niang] [The Assassin] [2015]
