'They Will Kill You' Review: Zazie Beetz & Myha'la in Horror Comedy
Zazie Beetz in 'They Will Kill You.'
Graham Bartholomew/Warner Bros. Entertainment
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At the end of it all, a flabbergasted detective asks a survivor what’s just occurred. The victim, battered and exhausted and covered in blood, grunts out just two words: “Rich people.”
That’s about the extent of the social commentary on offer from They Will Kill You, a new action-horror-comedy set in a Manhattan luxury building whose Satan-worshipping tenants engage in ritualistic killings of their mostly poor and marginalized staff. But it’s all the excuse writer-director Kirill Sokolov (Why Don’t You Just Die!) and his co-writer Alex Litvak need to unleash great big arterial sprays with gonzo style, to enjoyably giddy, if ultimately insubstantial, effect.
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They Will Kill You
The Bottom Line
Not a lot of brains, but plenty of splattered guts.
Release date: Friday, March 27
Cast: Zazie Beetz, Myha'la, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, Patricia Arquette
Director: Kirill Sokolov
Screenwriters: Kirill Sokolov, Alex Litvak
Rated R,
1 hour 34 minutes
Arriving just one week after Ready or Not 2: Here I Come hit theaters — and having first debuted at SXSW just a few days after Ready or Not 2: Here I Come did — They Will Kill You will inevitably draw comparisons. It’s impossible to argue they aren’t fair.
Both films are about ordinary women brought into a tightly guarded enclave of the one percent, where they’re to be hunted for sacrifice by entitled sociopaths who’ve struck a literal deal with the Devil. Both films saddle their heroines with estranged younger sisters who harbor lingering resentment about having been abandoned by their big sisters in their youth, but now must make up with them in order to survive. Both films devolve into frenetic yet stylish melees deploying all manner of unusual weaponry before, finally, confronting the supernatural head-on.
But any assumption that they’re the same movie will be wiped out the moment the satin-cloaked Satanists of They Will Kill You corner Asia (Zazie Beetz), the newest maid at the exclusive Virgil apartments, in a closet — only for her to come out literally swinging with a sword, slicing one of their heads clean off to uncork the first of what will be many, many geysers of blood to come.
Asia, we learn through one of several flashbacks, is no oblivious victim but an “avenger,” as her boss (Patricia Arquette‘s Lily) puts it, with an irritated sigh suggesting she isn’t the first. Asia has come here under false pretenses with the intention of rescuing her sister, Maria (Myha’la), another recently hired maid. She’s thus armed to the teeth with blades and guns and ammo, though perhaps nothing is deadlier than her fighting spirit, honed over years of prison brawls. The residents of the Virgil, for their part, are more than ready to defend what’s theirs, with one major supernatural asset up their capacious sleeves that gives them the upper hand.
The simplicity of the plot — the only way out is a fire escape at the top of the building, forcing Asia to fight her way up its nine floors, á la The Raid: Redemption or Dredd — gives Sokolov a relatively blank canvas across which to splatter a grand and gory pastiche of seemingly everything he has ever found cool, from video games to animé to John Wick to Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino. If he’s yet to coalesce all those influences into his own distinctive style, he wields them with gleeful enthusiasm. He dials the violence up to Looney Tunes silliness while Beetz infuses it all with an effortless cool, giving Asia an athleticism that makes her a pleasure to watch and a defiance that makes her a joy to root for.
Asia never swings an axe when she can swing a flaming axe so that she can set her enemies on fire even as she hacks off their limbs. Furniture getting hurled through the air is captured in slow-motion, all the better to admire when it shatters on someone. Gunshots are punctuated by flurries of mattress stuffing falling through the air like snow. And I haven’t even revealed the big twist that accounts for the film’s most eye-poppingly gruesome sights; those, I’ll leave you to goggle at in the theater for yourself.
But even with that endless appetite for mayhem — and even with a trim 94-minute run time &md