Immaturity is a virtue in Kirill Sokolov’s action-horror-comedy, a slapstick class satire set in an exclusive New York apartment block where being on the list gains a hellish new meaning. Derivative, fright-free and frenetically stylised, it still partially confirms the promise of the director’s 2018 debut Why Don’t You Just Die!
Sokolov introduced Tarantino’s school of blackly comic ultra-violence to Putin’s Russia and this is his first feature in exile since criticising the Ukraine war, filmed in Latvia as part of producer Artem Vasilyev’s push to bring East European talent to the West. Its flashback prologue belongs to a weightier film, with Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) and kid sister Maria on the run from their brutish father. The rain is Seven-heavy as Maria gazes at shop window mannequins’ bourgeois dream, only to be led by Asia to a cheap convenience store where their ogre appears, with the sisters separated in the ensuing chaos.
Ten years later, Asia arrives at the Virgil, a super-rich preserve managed by Lilith (a waywardly Irish-accented Patricia Arquette), which offers a seemingly enviable if segregated lifestyle to its mostly black staff. “People vanished then, no one cared,” Lilith says of the neighbourhood’s pre-gentrified past. Asia’s first night shows little has changed when pig-masked Satanists crawl from the walls and are revealed as the clientele, led by Sharon (Heather Graham, pictured above). Asia’s samurai-level skills dispatch her assailants, only to see them rapidly revive. “Name on the list, you cannot die,” she’s told, and the list’s true nature is Sokolov at his feverishly inventive best. Asia’s mission, it transpires, is to save her now adult sister (Myha’la), resident somewhere in this hostile terrain.
They Will Kill You heavily resembles the set-up of Ready Or Not and its coincidentally current sequel Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, with a cursed, century-old high-rise much like Evil Dead Rise, while avenging heroine Asia and characters’ blazing introductory captions transpose Kill Bill’s Bride to Manhattan, even touching on Tarantino’s foot-fetish. Beetz’s fierce conviction carries the action as she slashes and burns her way through the immortal elite, with Maria’s eventual help.
Sokolov isn’t interested in horror scares or disquiet. The supernatural merely supercharges his existing style, as lopped heads grow vestigially back and Heather Graham’s ambulatory eyeball bounces after the sisters with signature excess. Why Don’t You Just Die!’s confined action as a hammer-wielding young man and his prospective father-in-law turned an apartment into a war-zone now gains a bigger, Grand Guignol stage. The scale of survivable carnage is, like Graham’s eye, explicitly cartoonish, Tex Avery splatter also in the gleeful vein of Sam Raimi’s superior Drag Me To Hell (whose own rogue eyeball may be homaged). Sokolov’s Russian films had sharper satiric intent, identifying societal misogyny tallying with Andrey Zvyagintsev’s infinitely more sombre sagas. As with many current Hollywood films, “the rich” are less specific boogeymen, whose status suffers only surface cuts.
The sight of two young black women slicing through our iniquitous overlords at least shows how far horror has come since the Eighties’ sexist slashers. If Sokolov could harness his anarchy to substantial emotion, They Will Kill You might be more than a lurid fairground ride. The adolescent filmmaking enjoyment which energetically propels his heroines past all obstacles is anyway hard to resist.
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