You Love to See It: 13 Assassins

As the stoic swordmaster Hirayama in Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, Tsuyoshi Ihara moves like a force of nature, his sinewy arms swinging his sword with irresistible strength. Even the Foley work reflects his terrible power, emphasizing the hard, brutal thunk of each strike hacking through cloth, flesh, and bone. Ihara’s unblinking stare and rough, jutting features work in perfect concert with the film’s emphasis on his singular talents, giving him the appearance of chipped granite or weathered driftwood, tough and stripped down, like his brutally efficient fighting style, to its essential elements.

During the climactic battle which makes up the film’s entire back half, Hirayama and his young apprentice Ogura hold a chokepoint in the death-trapped village of Ochiai. “Kill the ones who get past me,” Hirayama says calmly to the younger man as dozens of enemy samurai charge toward them. It’s a task not unlike that of the workers who move up and down conveyor belts to gather debris shaken loose by the machine’s reverberations, and Hirayama’s cuts are nothing if not mechanical, a single stroke for every enemy as though he’s clearing brush rather than killing men. The cumulative effect of this kind of violence is astonishing, creating and sustaining a mounting tension — an impression that anything so tightly wound must inevitably fly apart.

Part of the genius of 13 Assassins is that it trusts us to understand that this conclusion is foregone. Hirayama’s fatal mistake doesn’t even happen onscreen. One moment he’s cleaving through screaming enemies and the next time we cut back to him, his dying apprentice is watching him crawl bloody and wounded through the mud to beat another samurai’s head in with a rock before being cut down by a shell-shocked maniac swinging his katana madly at everything and nothing, a cruelly nihilistic mirror to Hirayama's lifelong devotion to the path of the sword. All his skill and dedication come apart, undone by a moment's artless violence as the spirit of war reaches out for him and brushes all his peerless skill aside to gather him into its scabbed and bloody arms.