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A Touch of Zen Movie Review

A Touch of Zen is a 1971 Taiwanese Hong Kong wuxia film directed by Kung Hu and starring Hsu Feng. It’s an uneven, but admirable and highly influential early wuxia movie.

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“The sea of suffering is boundless.

Arise and come ashore“

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A lethargic painter and a princess on the run cross paths. She introduces him to a monk whose training transforms him into a skilled fighter so he can protect her from the man who killed her family. Kung Hu is a renowned director of both Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema and this is his most iconic film for sure. This movie elevated the genre and clearly influenced others in the process, especially ‘Crouching Tiger’ and ‘House of Flying Daggers’ in some its most memorable forest action imagery.

The action is superbly executed undoubtedly. There are fights and battles here that are compelling and a whole lot of fun to watch. This is an epic spectacle of heightened emotions, long character arcs and powerful technical aspects, but in its striving to be so epic, it lost some of its magic in the process. The movie is way too long at three hours runtime and it also failed to develop its characters particularly well. I did like Hsu Feng in her role quite a bit and the movie was respectably feminist for its time, but although its themes are definitely interesting, I would have found them even more fascinating had the characters been better realized.

A Touch of Zen is interesting for having two entirely different halves. The second half becomes your standard martial arts affair, and although it was executed so well, I did wish for the first half’s elements to be retained in the movie that unfortunately discarded them. The horror ghost story elements were so intriguing to me that it’s a shame that they were never fully developed.

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The cinematography here is fantastic. The movie also benefits from some arresting imagery, gorgeous costumes, phenomenal production design and a powerful, fittingly evocative score for the time period and setting. The film’s tone is all over the place, but I did appreciate it for being so stylistically and tonally unique and versatile.