They Will Kill You Review: Satanic Beat-'Em-Up Offers Gore, Bad Jokes and Deja Vu
In They Will Kill You, a housekeeping role transforms into a brutal fight for survival within a derivative cocktail of action, comedy and horror that ultimately fails to satisfy. The film introduces audiences to the Virgil, one of New York's oldest and most exclusive co-op residences, which also happens to be thoroughly satanic. The building features a clerestory window embossed with an inverted pentagram glowing red day and night, though this detail remains hidden from street level by design.
A Hellish Residence with Frightening Amenities
Residents of the Virgil enjoy what might be considered fabulous amenities, including a full live-in maid staff with peculiarly high turnover, an entire floor dedicated to an unending all-hours orgy, and for those willing to pledge dark fealty to the building's board head, the promise of eternal life. As the promotional material might say: The Virgil - if you lived here, you'd be in hell by now.
For the Virgil's newly hired help, Asia portrayed by Zazie Beetz, the job comes with room and board and numerous strings attached that quickly tighten around her throat. Despite missing the bathroom-mirror warning that gives Kirill Sokolov's first English-language feature its title, the unrelenting narrative wastes no time establishing its stakes. Asia finds herself at the Virgil less to make beds and more to serve as a human sacrifice to their unholy anti-God.
The Wrong Proletarian to Trifle With
What the Virgil's wealth-curdled lifers don't realize is they've chosen the wrong proletarian to challenge. The film isolates the thesis of 1943's The Seventh Victim, the first production to correctly link Manhattan real estate holders with the devil. That film's producer Val Lewton famously posited that "death is good," while Sokolov's rambunctious, only-sometimes-winningly sophomoric beat-'em-up amends this axiom to "death is also epically effin' bad-ass."
Tonally pitched between a bloodbath and bath time, a boyish strain of immaturity dominates as the creative force for director Sokolov. This approach proves amusing at times but more often manifests in commonplace, enervating ways. The concept works best in the film's giddy, inventive approach to violence, with the narrative device of immortality unshackling the director from the laws of physics as he molds bodies into new shapes as if they're made from Play-Doh.
Inventive Gore and Adolescent Humor
The antic gore reaches its peak during an extended interlude following a disembodied eyeball, seemingly fabricated with practical effects, as it rolls down corridors with the locomotion of a remote-controlled cat toy before slingshotting itself up an elevator shaft. No thirsts for blood will be left unslaked by this visual spectacle.
However, the adolescent quality runs deeper than the violence, manifesting more overtly in the potty-mouthedness the script wears like a suit two sizes too big because it's borrowed from dad. Most of the ostentatious stylistic flourishes appear as hand-me-downs as well. Sokolov's IMDb profile openly states what his work makes obvious - that he idolizes Sergio Leone, Martin McDonagh, Park Chan-wook, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino.
The director owes his greatest debt to Bong Joon-ho, whose Snowpiercer lends the film its contained level-by-level structuring, building out the confines of Sokolov's earlier apartment-bound feature Why Don't You Just Die! These reference points have already been so thoroughly claimed and absorbed into the vocabulary of action cinema that audiences ultimately experience an impersonation of an impersonation with diluted virtuosity.
Supporting Cast and Familiar Tropes
Other minor offenses mostly concern the supporting cast, which appears haphazardly assembled and half-assedly differentiated from one another. The tenants that Sokolov and his co-writer Alex Litvak bother giving lines to prove virtually interchangeable. Heather Graham and Tom Felton receive the most to do by virtue of wielding relatively higher degrees of name-recognition.
Both actors are billed beneath the Virgil's manager portrayed by Patricia Arquette, whose Academy Award recedes into the distance as she tentatively attempts an accent of untraceable geographic origins, best estimated as somewhere in the Loweffortshire region of the English countryside. Industry star Myha'la, just before her profile would outgrow roles this thin and thankless, also appears as Asia's sister whose captivity sets the entire rampage in motion.
Theirs represents a powerful bond, but to conquer the ultimate evil, they'll need assistance from some lazily resolved convolutions of plot. The sister-sister dynamic constitutes only one of many similarities shared with last weekend's Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come. Sokolov's curiously similar combination of hide-and-seek to the death with barely-there class commentary represents the Antz to the other film's A Bug's Life.
Genre Conventions and Final Assessment
Perhaps this similarity comes as no coincidence. Genre festivals and release schedules during slow months require a steady supply of programming, and there exists no safer route to screens than assuming the Grand Guignol glibness currently in vogue, as evidenced by 2022's The Menu. Helped along by sprightly fight choreography, a score of retro synth arpeggios and its flood of dyed corn syrup, They Will Kill You manages to get by on the guileless enthusiasm that gives charm to low-budget, over-the-top horror.
However, the invoked inspirations and story components both err on the side of the popular and well-trodden, and the received shtick grows worn before long. A good rule of severed thumb suggests that if you're going to make a character quote Monty Python's immortal "just a flesh wound" bit, you must yourself be capable of originally generating something at least as funny. They Will Kill You is currently showing in Australian cinemas and will release in the United States and United Kingdom on March 27.
