Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?

Friday, September 18: This screening will be presented with open captions.

In his first film shot primarily in English, Shinya Tsukamoto returns to the subject that has haunted his recent work: the physical, psychological, and moral devastation war leaves behind. Yet this is no repetition. Tsukamoto once again reinvents his cinematic approach, confronting violence from a deeply unsettling perspective.

Years in the making, the film recounts the experiences of Vietnam War veteran Allen Nelson (Rodney Hicks, with newcomer Mark Merphy portraying the younger Allen). Born into poverty in Brooklyn, Nelson joins the Marines at eighteen and is sent to Vietnam. Combat destroys his belief in military heroism and leaves him profoundly traumatized. Decades later, after losing his family and becoming homeless, he is forced to confront the memories he has tried to suppress, aided by a Veterans Affairs psychologist and challenged by a child’s devastating question: “Mr. Nelson, did you kill people?”

Tsukamoto offers no comforting moral distance. War does not simply drive ordinary people to violence. It authorizes, organizes, and transforms violence into duty, unleashing the darkest impulses buried within the human soul. “Why did you kill?”, a question repeatedly asked by Nelson’s psychologist (Geoffrey Rush), becomes the film’s moral centre, echoing and deepening the haunting query posed in its title.

Propelled by relentless narrative momentum that keeps the viewer emotionally engaged throughout, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? unfolds as a fierce, harrowing, and profoundly humane experience. Combining a visceral visual language with uncompromising moral intelligence, it is both a portrait of one veteran and an indictment of the systems that manufacture killers and abandon survivors: urgent, devastating, and impossible to dismiss.

GIOVANNA FULVI

Content advisory: explicit violence, strobing effects, coarse language, crude content, mature themes