'Mr. Nelson' Venice Premiere Slammed as Misfire — SkimNews
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- Shinya Tsukamoto directed 'Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?' — based on the autobiographical writings of Allen Nelson, a Black American soldier in Vietnam — and the film premiered at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival, where it is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
- Rodney Hicks, a Broadway veteran, plays middle-aged Nelson opposite Geoffrey Rush as his psychiatrist Dr. Daniels, while Mark Merphy plays the young adult Nelson scavenging in a ruin of trash and animals.
- The review criticizes the film's dialogue as stilted and contraction-free, reading as if machine-translated from formal Japanese, which it says no English speaker would naturally talk this way — leaving actors 'disconnected from their own performances.'
- At roughly 2 hours, the film 'feels endless' as it breezes past natural exit points; its repetitive dramatic structure centers on Nelson repeatedly recounting wartime stories to Daniels, who asks each session why he took lives in Vietnam.
- Reviewer argues the film's cultural inquiries 'would also verge on offensive if they weren't so devoid of lived reality,' singling out a Martin Luther King Jr. photograph moment as a 'total headscratcher' that feels 'entirely alien' in its handling of Blackness.
- Tsukamoto, working as his own cinematographer, is faulted for seemingly being 'completely unfamiliar with photographing Black skin,' with Hicks's troubled performance repeatedly 'washed out by the invading sunlight.'
- The reviewer notes the film deliberately avoids real U.S. military uniforms — the military owns copyright to its attire and typically demands script approval — giving the production's 'freeform fantasia' an inadvertent political purpose alongside its otherwise 'cacophonous' execution.
Why it matters: A Tsukamoto film — from the director of cult cyberpunk landmark 'Tetsuo: The Iron Man' — premiering at Venice is normally an event, but this 2-hour Vietnam War drama was dismissed as a 'lifeless simulacrum' whose outsider perspective on American war crimes and Black American identity falls flat due to stilted dialogue and what the reviewer calls cultural non-specificity. The film still lacks U.S. distribution, meaning its commercial fate — and whether this damaging review defines its reception — remains undetermined.
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