If Shinya Tsukamoto‘s “Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People?” were the first, or even the 51st, movie to litigate the atrocities committed by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War, perhaps on a purely informational level some justification would exist for its crudely simplistic approach. Nuance is often a casualty of war, especially when that war is ongoing or recently ended. But this is 2026, when — in contrast to the era in which the real, evidently heroic Allen Nelson, on whose memoir the film is based, toured his cautionary horror story internationally — you’d be hard pressed to find a substantial contingent unaware that the Vietnam War has since been judged a mistake so costly in human life and dignity that it forced arguably the most substantial reevaluation of American self-identity since independence.
Even still, reliving the dehumanizing cruelty of conflict and working through its aftermath might be a valuable exercise if new insights, uncovered through this one man’s PTSD journey, could then be scaled up and applied to the national psyche. And revisiting Vietnam through the eyes of a Black American, via the outsider perspective of the Japanese director of “Tetsuo: The Iron Man,” no less, must surely deliver some new insights? But despite half taking place in a therapist’s office, “Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People?” is only invested in its lead’s psychology insofar as it provides the excuse for a series of increasingly grisly and violent flashbacks, and has nothing but the most cursory and stereotype-laden interest in the effect of the war on the African-American community specifically.
Marine Allen Nelson (played by Mark Merphy as a younger man and Rodney Hicks as his older counterpart) has recently returned from the front in severe shellshock. Unwilling to subject his family to his bouts of paranoia and rage, he is dossing in a filthy, boarded-up building in New York City, with only a straggly cat and the fat, oily alley rats for company. Furtively darting out to shoplift some supplies one day, he is accosted by an old classmate who brightly announces she is now a schoolteacher and invites him to speak about his war experiences to her class. He demurs initially.
But then, some boys throw bangers nearby, and he finds himself diving for cover under a nearby car, where, in one of the film’s more effectively abstract evocations of a dissociative episode, he watches the slice of pavement visible from his vantage point reverberating to the deafening chaos of explosions and gunfire in his mind. He shows up at the class, lathered in sweat (the sweat-spray and gunshot-squib cost for this film must represent a sizeable portion of its budget) and hesitantly begins to speak. But he is unable to answer the moppet who — in a sentimental, heavily-leaned-into close-up — poses the question that gave Nelson’s original memoir, and gives Tsukamoto’s film, its name.
Years later, Nelson is married to Linda (pity poor Tatyana Ali, saddled with an almost comically underwritten, saintly-supportive-partner role) and is raising her son as his own. But he cannot sleep without medication to suppress his violent nightmares. After a particularly troubling outburst, he goes into therapy and, piece by piece, tells his story to Dr Daniels (Geoffrey Rush). These flashbacks betray where writer-director-cinematographer-editor Tsukamoto’s filmmaking interests really lie, which is in the gruesome recreation of hideous acts of barbarism and cruelty. Some of those, for good measure, he cuts into a montage, alongside rats gnawing on maggoty flesh and piles of moldering corpses, to deploy whenever things get boring back in one of the brown rooms of Allen’s present life. So, quite often.
It is deeply unsavory that a film with such a ploddingly earnest anti-war message only comes alive in the depiction of violent, brutal death. As if aware of that, Tsukamoto seem to arrange the non-combat scenes as a penance, as though we, like the protagonist, must atone for the base thrills of warfare with endless tedious talk sessions. Hicks is a Broadway actor of some standing, but it’s very hard to tell here given that the ESL-style screenplay leaves him no register to work in other than sweatily anguished or, occasionally, sweatily relieved and illuminated in one of the rare shafts of sunlight allowed to penetrate Tsukamoto’s penumbral images.
Rush, bringing what gravitas he can to a role that is essentially a dark brown sweater with eyes, compensates for essentially only having one line of dialogue (“Why did you kill people, Allen?”) by repeating it approximately one million times with slight variations of emphasis and formulation, until it finally elicits the breakthrough Allen needs. Beware this false dawn, however. It may have taken an eternity to get to, but this is only the first of many natural cutoff points where Tsukamoto could have put us out of our and Allen’s misery, only to instead fade up into yet another epilogue.
The film has maybe eight or ten endings — forgive the inexactness, you too may lose track of the number of times you are halfway out of your seat with one arm in the sleeve of your coat, before realizing that no, that very obvious dramatic beat was not the final bow, because now, suddenly Allen has a beard and a daughter! Oh, now his beard is gray. Oh, now he’s on a boat! And here is Lily Franky, the great Japanese actor who is fourth-billed but arrives at the eleventh hour to deliver a single monologue to a closed bathroom door. It is rare to come across a film — especially in a major festival’s competition lineup — in which not only does so little work, it is given such endless acreage in which to keep not working, which is especially striking given that there’s little in “Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People?” that can’t be boiled down to: “Yes, I did.”
