Hou Hsiao-Hsien has talked about making a martial-arts film for at least a decade, but we all knew that he wouldn’t come up with anything in the King Hu or Lau Kar-Leung traditions. That doesn’t prevent his new film – eight years in the making – from being a real surprise. The Assassin reminds us that the Chinese title of Hou’s film The Puppetmaster was Xi Meng Rensheng – “Theatre, Dream, Life”. Here, the brief flurries of action are “theatre,”; the plot’s shifting patterns of love, loyalty and betrayal are “dream”; and “life” is the meticulous, imaginative account of the ways people lived in the Tang Dynasty which runs through the entire film. A lot of historical research has gone into this adaptation of the ancient story of a young woman trained to become a ruthless assassin when her fiancée is snatched away from her into a politically convenient marriage, but the truth is that nobody really knows what life was like in China 1200 years ago. The film’s narrative hinges on a question: will Yinniang (Shu Qi) be able to kill her ex-fiancé Lord Tian (Chang Chen) after she has spied on his home-life with his wife, his mistress and his children? (Tony RAYNS)