Tsukamoto's 'Mr. Nelson' Is a Venice Misfire — SkimNews
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- Shinya Tsukamoto directs "Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?," based on the autobiographical writings of Allen Nelson, starring Mark Merphy as young Nelson and Broadway veteran Rodney Hicks as the older Nelson alongside Geoffrey Rush as his psychiatrist Dr. Daniels
- The film premiered at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival and is currently seeking U.S. distribution
- The dialogue features conspicuous stiltedness with no contractions, reading as though machine-translated from formal Japanese, leaving actors disconnected from their performances
- The 2-hour running time is built around repetitive therapy sessions in which Daniels asks the same loaded question about killing in Vietnam, yielding diminishing dramatic returns
- The review finds Tsukamoto's treatment of race perplexing, noting his apparent unfamiliarity with photographing Black skin (he served as his own cinematographer) and calling his handling of Blackness either culturally nonspecific or reductive pop pastiche
- The review credits the film with one political inversion, noting its deliberately inaccurate uniforms sidestep the U.S. military's typical script-approval demands, making for a refreshingly unflinching outsider portrait of American war crimes
Why it matters: A cyberpunk auteur tackling Vietnam from a Black soldier's perspective is a striking premise, but the reviewer finds the execution so culturally distant and dramatically repetitive that it undercuts its own antiwar aims — Variety's parallel headline ('Assaultive Yet Turgid') signals the negative consensus is widespread across major festival coverage, not an outlier take.
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