I honestly think that there will be no better film this year than Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin. The director conveys a deep and powerful understanding of everything that is human, and he captures this in a film that seems catered to those with enough patience for the themes to be completely felt. And as each sequence falls upon the previous one — creating a complex yet still fully comprehensible narrative — we can feel the weight of the characters’ emotions; we feel their journey and the rollercoaster of feelings they experience throughout the film. Both the cinematography and the music allow these sensations to be felt at the bottom of your soul.

The Assassin is first and foremost a sensorial film, beginning with a black and white segment introducing the protagonist Nie Yinniang (Qi Shu), an expert killer. She has been trained by a nun who lives in a temple high up in the mountains, and in the first scene, we see them converse about the missions through gorgeous monochrome tones featuring the white faces against the dark environment. We are also given ?the rules of the game,? at least in terms of the assassin’s abilities, as she seems to move around with little weight — just like the old (and sometimes recent) Wuxia films of the 70s onwards.