9th century China. Entrusted for years to a mysterious woman who taught her the martial arts, Nie Yinniang finds her family. Now a formidable warrior, she is charged with eliminating Tian Ji'an, the governor of Weibo Province, who has risen against the Emperor and refuses his authority. But Tian Ji'an is the cousin of Nie, to whom she was promised years ago. And while the order of the Assassins commands her to kill, she has doubts about her mission and her true feelings...

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Silence has its limits, and the opaque cinema of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien does too. Draped in a careful staging, which is low on violence by the sword and high on enchantment within wild forests, The Assassin is intriguing and impressive until it becomes tiresome. Impenetrable, the story drags on about very ordinary issues (the dilemma of a killer charged with murdering a man sword she has feelings). The dark characters go from being statues to disjointed dolls, the filmmaker seems to resist shooting confrontational scenes (when the heroine takes on the challenge of a fight, the camera stays far away). The film quickly gets bogged down in artistic statements which, instead of captivating and amazing the audience, makes it bored and irritated. The Assassin won Best Director at Cannes 2015, but it doesn’t meet the benchmark set by the director of A City of Sadness and Millennium Mambo, which much better served his favorite actress Shu Qui.