‘Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?’: A passionate but uneven anti-war biopic

Mark Merphy plays the young Allen Nelson, a U.S. Marine whose real-life experiences in the Vietnam War are dramatized in Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?” | © “Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?” Film Partners

Sep 18, 2026

Japanese directors who film in foreign settings with non-Japanese actors deserve credit for stepping outside their cultural comfort zones. But Hirokazu Koreeda’s “The Truth” (2019) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Daguerreotype” (2016) — both shot in France — do not rank anywhere near the top of their distinguished filmographies. 

That is also the case with Shinya Tsukamoto’s uneven, if passionate, “Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?” The film is the third of an informal anti-war trilogy that includes “Fires on the Plain” (2014) and “Shadow of Fire” (2023). Unlike those films, which featured Japanese protagonists, the latest is based on the life of Allen Nelson, a Black New Yorker who served in the Marines during the Vietnam War and later spoke about his experiences to nearly 1,200 audiences in Japan — a fact the film does not dramatize.

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