If video stores were still a thing in this day and age, you could imagine customers getting confused over “The Assassin” — after all, a Chinese-language film with that title and whose key art features a weapon-wielding woman immediately calls to mind a certain brand of action movie.
For master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien — who won Best Director at Cannes for the film that Taiwan is submitting as its Oscar entry this year — the tropes of the wuxia movie (the best known example of which in the U.S. is probably “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) are merely the underpinnings for a haunting, enigmatic story of deferred, conflicted vengeance, set in ninth-century China.