Timo continues developing his uniquely relentless hybrid of criminal underworld power struggle thriller, athletic martial arts face-melter and extreme splatter horror (that plays like something of a sadistically gory John Woo movie) with this nearly 2.5 hour epic about a rogue orphaned member of a lady Splinter Cell ninja order programmed to be ruthless killers for profit who has a moral crisis and goes off the books to climb Jakarta's chain of drug/sex trafficking club-owners to its corrupt cops/politicians (and their psychotic Tony Montana wannabe failsons) in a series of astonishingly vicious and bloody setpieces.

Tracking her progress from Yakuza hideouts (where we're introduced to the high-tech nature of their ninja craft that deploys machine guns, night-vision and nail bombs alongside the classic blood geyser decapitations), to pounding electronic/neon nightclub hallways (featuring some sick chunky shotgun blast meat-shields and a fight floor level transition by literally tackling a guy from one to the other), and not one but two industrial warehouse finales. A climactic politician/drug-dealer massacre where she needs to navigate grenade launcher explosions, baseball bat POV hits, a general chaotic sea of squealing car tire smoke and bullet-riddled blood mist (MVP: that shot of the guy missing his kick and shattering car window instead, and her dragging/slicing his leg along the broken glass), followed by another with her more punishing and skilled employers who aren't happy about having to clean up after her pointlessly vengeful bloodbath.

As was also true of Night Comes for Us, you almost just want catalog the myriad of creative way this man finds to tear flesh from bone via fist, sword, gun and fist but also: receipt poker/rusty pole impalements, boiling wok/stove burns, Fulci inspired eye damage (gouging, attempted blade-poking, head squeeze... popping). All this hellish bodily suffering, which is not just the gleeful annihilation of bad guys but also the pretty mercilessly brutal treatment of the friends she's trying to protect, serving as a test for how much pain we're willing to endure to resist and maybe even change the way the powerful tell us the way the world has to be. "... It won't ever end." 

A little suspicious about some of the John Wick style world-building and set-up they're hinting at for more of these, but if he can keep the craft at this level I can't imagine I'll be complaining too much. By far the loudest thing I've seen at the festival so far.

Further discussion on ep 347 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS, as part of our TIFF24 coverage.