Shinya Tsukamoto, the Japanese director known for cult genre films such as Tetsuo: The Iron Man, has made an unexpected departure with Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, a solemn drama about an African American US Marine's psychological collapse during the Vietnam War. The film is based on the memoir of Allen Nelson, a real veteran who overcame severe PTSD and became a popular lecturer in Japan, delivering over 1,200 talks about the atrocities he committed in combat; Tsukamoto was inspired to make the film after attending one of Nelson's lectures. The Hollywood Reporter review finds the result sincere but uneven, praising the visceral, gruelling war sequences while criticising the clumsier domestic drama scenes.

The film, written, shot, directed and edited entirely by Tsukamoto, alternates between Nelson's brutal experiences as a young marine (Mark Merphy) and his later struggles as a traumatised father (Rodney Hicks) undergoing therapy with a psychiatrist played by Geoffrey Rush. The war scenes depict Nelson's platoon, mostly Black soldiers, carrying out increasingly savage reprisals against Vietnamese villagers after an ambush, rendered with a graphic intensity the reviewer compares to Brian De Palma's Casualties of War. By contrast, the home-front scenes showing Nelson's breakdowns with his wife (Tatyana Ali) and children are described as stagier and heavy-handed, leaving the film caught uneasily between visceral war drama and an on-the-nose message picture.