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James Mottram

4/5 stars
“We were taught to treat Asians like they were less than human,” says Allen Nelson in Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, a true-life drama about a former US Marine faced with a reckoning.
Screening in competition at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, this often powerful work is based on Nelson’s memoir of the same name. Somewhat surprisingly, Shinya Tsukamoto, the cult Japanese director behind Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) and Bullet Ballet (1998), adapted it in what is only his second English-language production.
As the end credits tell us, this New Yorker was buried in Japan; in that country alone, he gave more than 1,200 talks about his horrifying experiences in the Vietnam war. How he reaches the point of being able to share his trauma is the film’s true focus.


It starts with a young Nelson (Mark Merphy) sleeping rough in an abandoned building after returning from Southeast Asia. A chance encounter leads an old school friend to implore him to speak to the children she teaches about his time overseas. Barely able to utter a word, he is left floored when a girl asks the very question that forms the film’s title.
Elegantly weaving elements of Nelson’s life before, during and after Vietnam, the film asks not if he killed, but why. This question certainly occupies his therapist, Dr Daniels (Geoffrey Rush), whose sessions with the older Nelson (Rodney Hicks) provide the backbone of the story.
Ravaged by PTSD, Hicks’ Nelson is a mess of a man, plagued by night terrors – to the point where he almost strangles his wife, Linda (Tatyana Ali), in front of his young stepson, Sean.
The flashbacks to Nelson’s time in the Marines are harrowing, with Tsukamoto showing his penchant for extreme violence – sometimes a little too gleefully – as Nelson’s platoon rips through villages.


“Don’t think. Follow orders. Kill,” he is told, but he has no idea why. “We fight for freedom … black people not free in America,” screams one Viet Cong soldier, and there is a genuine sense here that Nelson and his fellow grunts were simply programmed to kill, then discarded on the scrap heap.
Powered by a terrific, haunting performance from Hicks, best known as a playwright and theatre actor in the US, the film is a striking but never sentimental psychological portrait from Tsukamoto. Far from his comfort zone, and all the better for it, the director pays tribute to Nelson – a man who learned to address his demons in a way few ever do.
Alongside Spike Lee’s 2020 film Da 5 Bloods, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? is a crunching reminder of the senseless horrors of the Vietnam conflict.
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The Vietnam war drama, in competition at the Venice Film Festival, explores trauma, redemption through a US Marine’s true-life journey


The Vietnam war drama, in competition at the Venice Film Festival, explores trauma, redemption through a US Marine’s true-life journey.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Vietnam war drama, in competition at the Venice Film Festival, explores trauma, redemption through a US Marine’s true-life journey

The Vietnam war drama, in competition at the Venice Film Festival, explores trauma, redemption through a US Marine’s true-life journey