Kill Bill: Vol. 1
2003 · Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Original language: English
- action
- crime
The story
An assassin is shot by her ruthless employer, Bill, and other members of their assassination circle – but she lives to plot her vengeance.
What it’s like
Saturated primary colour everywhere: a blood-red hospital room, a yellow jumpsuit, a snow-white garden in Tokyo, a neon-soaked Shibuya night of pink and electric blue. Tarantino stages his set pieces in wide, deliberate frames with loving attention to costume and blocking, cutting between hand-drawn anime interludes, grindhouse-style scratches and sudden silence before a sword is drawn. The sound is a mixed tape of spaghetti-western guitar, Japanese strings and Nancy Sinatra-style pop, punctuated by the hiss and clang of steel. Vibe: giddy, stylised and cool, like a genre love letter played at full volume. Pacing is clipped and episodic, bursting into long, choreographed fights and then settling into chapter-title pauses. The violence is frequent, bloody and cartoonishly exaggerated, with spurting wounds and dismemberment handled as spectacle rather than dread, and there is some strong language. Emotionally it stays with a single woman's relentless, wry determination. For fans of martial-arts cinema, revenge stories and vivid, playful genre pastiche who don't mind a lot of stylised gore.
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