Movie Review: They Will Kill You

If you’d have told me that a darkly humorous movie about a woman taking on a luxury high-rise full of immortal Satanists to try and rescue her estranged sister in a series of hyperviolent action scenes would wind up being more than a little bit boring, I wouldn’t have believed you. Alas, experiencing They Will Kill You would have proved you correct. Despite the core concept sounding like something that would be right up my alley, Kirill Sokolov’s latest is a weirdly flat affair that can only manage to be intermittently entertaining.

The always engaging Zazie Beetz is Asia Reeves, the aforementioned woman who takes a job as a maid in the faux-opulent Virgil tower because she has reason to believe her sister Maria (Myha’la) was last seen there. The pair last saw each other during a botched attempt to escape from their abusive father and after spending a few years in prison, Asia is determined to try and keep her sister safe. Her private investigator (Angus Sampson) has tracked Maria to The Virgil and takes Asia there, informing her that the exclusive building has a reputation for staff disappearing under suspicious circumstances, but she won’t be deterred.

Once inside, Asia meets superintendent Lilith Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette donning an odd approximation of an Irish accent), her husband Ray (Paterson Joseph), and a few of the residents before being shown to her new quarters. That night she is set upon by a group of tenants, including Kevin (Tom Felton) and Sharon (Heather Graham), who need to claim her for their next sacrifice, beginning her on her very bloody quest through the tower.

Even though the majority of them are wildly underutilized the cast are all pretty committed to the insanity, which at least goes some way towards maintaining the audience’s engagement. The plot on the other hand likes to promise up over-the-top fun it only seems to occasionally deliver. The splatterpunk violence has been done countless times before and to better effect, with Sokolov and his co-writer Alex Litvak here seeming unsure if they want it to be horrific or comedic in a Looney Tunes way. I suspect they were aiming for the latter, but the sense of gleeful whimsy required to pull that off successfully is largely absent.

We’re promised a tower in which each floor is devoted to those partaking in a different vice but only offered the briefest glimpse of the most obvious one, left to wonder for ourselves what the others might even be (gambling? drugs? Real Housewives marathons?). It was probably more of a budgeting issue than anything else, but then why even mention it at all? Some of the staging is clever, like the long, bisected shots of the cast crawling through the building’s innards, but most of it serves only to remind us of other, better films. The Raid: Redemption, Ready or Not, Kill Bill, and most obviously The Evil Dead all come to mind, and one sometimes can’t help but wish to be watching them instead.

They Will Kill You never lags at least, and while it does begin to feel fairly repetitive over its mercifully brief 90-minute run time, the game cast and stylish cinematography provide just enough of interest to pull one along towards the conclusion, which unfortunately also manages to be less interesting than promised. If this had gone direct to streaming and been watched with friends and a few drinks, perhaps it would be more enjoyable, but as it stands it’s not as cool as it thinks it is, not as bonkers as it ought to be, and not as much fun as I’d hoped. ★★