Name: Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?
Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Shinya Tsukamoto has world-premiered Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, a drama built from the memoir of Allen Nelson, a U.S. Marine sent to Vietnam in 1966. The film competes for the Golden Lion, and it arrives on the Lido as the last panel of a triptych: Tsukamoto has now made three features about how the twentieth century turned ordinary men into killers, and this is the one that names the machinery in the first person.

The question in the title is the whole method. Nelson, played by Rodney Hicks in his first leading role, is a man who joined the Marines to escape poverty and returns at twenty-three unable to live inside himself — homeless, estranged from his family, carrying what he did rather than only what was done to him. Tsukamoto has said the hardest thing to film was not the war but the sentence a child once put to Nelson directly, the one the movie borrows for its name. The story reaches its counsellor’s office through Geoffrey Rush, who plays the veterans’-hospital psychiatrist Dr. Daniels; the cast also includes Tatyana Ali, Lily Franky and Mark Merphy.

What makes the premiere worth watching, beyond the subject, is who is standing behind the camera — because with Tsukamoto that is nearly everyone. He wrote the film, directed it, shot it and cut it, the way he has worked since Tetsuo: The Iron Man welded his name to Japanese cinema in 1989. A Tsukamoto film is not a committee’s compromise; it is one sensibility pressed onto every frame, which is why his violence has always felt handmade, close, without the buffer of a big crew’s polish. Turning that instrument on a real man’s testimony rather than a metal nightmare is the move the Sala Grande came to see.

The film is the third movement of what he has called, without ever formalising it, a war trilogy. Fires on the Plain played in competition here in 2014, a starving soldier’s descent adapted from Shohei Ooka; Shadow of Fire followed in 2023, set in the scorched black market of post-surrender Japan. Both looked at the soldier as victim of the state that armed him. Mr. Nelson turns the lens the other way, onto the harder admission — that becoming a perpetrator is its own kind of ruin, and that the guilt does not end when the war does. It is a Japanese director reaching across to an American war to say so, filmed in English, a Japan–U.S.–Thailand–Vietnam co-production running 116 minutes.

Tsukamoto has been unusually plain about why he made it now. “Given the current state of the world, it seemed to me that bringing his story back to life was the most urgent priority,” he has said, adding a fear that his own country “may move closer toward war.” His argument sits underneath the drama like a fault line: “When you go to war, killing people — the very thing that is considered most wrong in our everyday lives — becomes your job.” The real Nelson spent his later life carrying that contradiction to audiences in Japan, where he gave more than a thousand talks; the film is, in part, Tsukamoto handing that voice a second life.

Whether it holds together as cinema rather than testimony is the open question a first screening cannot fully settle — a director whose signature is stylised, bodily horror is here bound to the flat, documentary weight of a real biography, and the two impulses do not always want the same film. That tension is exactly what a competition premiere exists to expose.

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Kino Films opens the picture in Japan on 11 September, a week after the Lido saw it first.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Shinya Tsukamoto, Geoffrey Rush, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, Rodney Hicks