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Assassin's Creed review: Australian Justin Kurzel turns epic into art film

The blockbuster Assassin's Creed confirms Australian director Justin Kurzel's identity as an art filmmaker – stressing the emptiness of violent fantasy rather than the thrill of escape.

★★★½
(M) 115 minutes

Films based on video games are often derided as hackwork – but Assassin's Creed is the most daring film yet from the Australian director Justin Kurzel, previously known for the true-crime drama Snowtown and a strenuously dark version of Macbeth.

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When Callum Lynch explores the memories of his ancestor Aguilar and gains the skills of a Master Assassin, he discovers he is a descendant of the secret Assassins society.

Aided by regular Australian collaborators such as the cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, Kurzel has used the resources of Hollywood to make an art film where the obscurity is the point: bodies are veiled in shadow, objects slide in and out of focus, the air is thick with dust and we're hardly meant to grasp all the details of the nonsensical plot.

There's reason to believe that the version of Assassin's Creed now in cinemas has been significantly cut back, making it hard to tell how far the narrative ambiguities are intentional.

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Still, the notion of murkiness is thematically central to the film – a baroque allegory in the tradition of the late Raul Ruiz, involving a modern branch of the Knights Templar, the medieval Christian order that has long fascinated conspiracy theorists and pulp storytellers alike.

Down the centuries, it seems, the Knights have searched for the Apple of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden, hoping to use its power to create a perfect world by abolishing free will. Pitted against them are the ruthless yet ultimately benevolent Assassins, whose motto is "We work in the dark to serve the light".

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Michael Fassbender, who starred in Kurzel's Macbeth, returns here as the anti-hero Callum Lynch – a killer saved from execution only to find himself a prisoner of the Templars, who have updated their methods if not their fundamentalist beliefs.

Under the supervision of Dr Sofia Rikken (Marion Cotillard, also returning from Macbeth), he's strapped to an infernal machine that forces him to relive the memories of an ancestor (Fassbender again) an assassin during the Spanish Inquisition.

These memories involve a lot of sword fighting, as well as leaping between roofs and running impossibly up walls, in a manner that could be described as "Escher parkour". Back in the laboratory, we see Lynch going through the same motions, like a video-game player thrusting and parrying in a void.

This self-reflexive device stems from the Assassin's Creed games themselves, and has parallels in previous blockbusters such as Avatar. But Kurzel deploys it in an alienating way that again confirms his identity as an art filmmaker – stressing the emptiness of violent fantasy rather than the thrill of escape.

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