Come find your new home at the Virgil, one of New York’s oldest and most exclusive and certainly most satanic co-op residences. Never mind the clerestory window embossed with an inverted pentagram that glows red day and night. (You can’t see it from street level anyhow, which is by design.) You’ll be too busy enjoying such fabulous amenities as 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 their dark fealty to the head of the building’s board, eternal life. The Virgil: if you lived here, you’d be in hell by now.
For the Virgil’s newly hired help, Asia (Zazie Beetz), the job comes with room and board and a whole lot of strings attached, which quickly tighten around her throat. Even though she misses the bathroom-mirror warning that gives Kirill Sokolov’s first English-language feature its title, the unrelenting They Will Kill You wastes no time in establishing its stakes: Asia is here less to make beds and more to serve as a human sacrifice to their unholy anti-God. What the Virgil’s wealth-curdled lifers don’t know is they’ve trifled with the wrong proletarian. In isolating the thesis of 1943’s The Seventh Victim, the first film to correctly link Manhattan real estate holders with the devil, its producer Val Lewton famously posited that “death is good”; 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 is the dominant creative force for Sokolov, at times amusingly but more often in commonplace, enervating ways. This works best in his giddy, inventive approach to violence, the narrative device of immortality unshackling him from the laws of physics as he molds bodies into new shapes as if they’re made out of Play-Doh. His antic gore peaks with an extended interlude following a disembodied eyeball (seemingly fabricated with practical effects, jerry-rigged artisanship being one of the film’s more endearing aspects) as it rolls down corridors with the locomotion of a remote-controlled cat toy and then slingshots itself up an elevator shaft. No thirsts for blood will be left unslaked.
The adolescent quality runs deeper than that, however, 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 are hand-me-downs, too; Sokolov’s IMDb comes right out and states what his work makes obvious, that he idolizes “Sergio Leone, Martin McDonagh, Park Chan-wook, Martin Scorsese, and, of course, Quentin Tarantino”. Though he owes the greatest debt of all 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 – in some cases, by Tarantino himself – that we’re ultimately being subjected to an impersonation of an impersonation with the virtuosity diluted.
Other minor offenses mostly concern the supporting cast, haphazardly assembled and half-assedly differentiated from one another. The tenants that Sokolov and his co-writer, Alex Litvak, bother giving lines are all but interchangeable – Heather Graham and Tom Felton getting the most to do by virtue of wielding relatively higher degrees of name-recognition. Though they’re both billed beneath the Virgil’s manager, Patricia Arquette, her Academy Award receding 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 whole rampage in motion. Theirs is a powerful bond, but to conquer the ultimate evil, they’ll need a little help from some lazily resolved convolutions of plot.
The sister-sister dynamic is 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 representing the Antz to the other film’s A Bug’s Life. Though perhaps it’s no coincidence; genre festivals and release schedules in the slow months need a steady supply of programming, and there’s no safer route to screens than assuming the Grand Guignol glibness currently in vogue (See also: 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 should be able to get by on the guileless enthusiasm that gives charm to low-budget, over-the-top horror. But the invoked inspirations and story components both err on the side of the popular and well-trod, and the received shtick grows worn before long. A good rule of (severed) thumb: 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 out in Australian cinemas now and in the US and UK on 27 March
