I was looking forward to Kirill Sokolov’s debut English-language feature They Will Kill You, despite the odd choice of Warner Bros. choosing to release this film one week after the Ready or Not sequel. This is significant for a few reasons, the obvious being how similarly these two films are packaged. They both have the same overall schtick – two sisters vs. an army of evil rich people. It’s also significant because the two films were originally supposed to release on the same day, before Ready or Not moved up a week. Also, both films premiered only days apart from each other at the recent SXSW film festival. Well, now, having seen both films, I was pleased to find They Will Kill You is not simply Ready or Not 2 (Take 2), but also I definitely don’t think it’s the better film.

Asia Reeves (Zazie Beetz) went to prison 10 years ago as a result of protecting her younger sister from their abusive father. 10 years later, she arrives at The Virgil, a super exclusive apartment building in Manhattan, under the guise of taking a job as their new maid. However, she’s really there because she hears The Virgil is where the now-adult age Maria (Myha’la) might be. She is greeted by the building superintendent Lilith (Patricia Arquette), who immediately gives her bad vibes. Shortly afterward, she is attacked in her living quarters by several people in the building, who are involved in a very weird and very specific demonic cult that performs ritualistic murders. But, Asia’s come prepared and she’s ready to fight back.

They Will Kill You is really fun for awhile. There’s an energy and a fluidity to the fight scenes, a buoyancy and a verve to the camerawork, and a gleefulness to the brutality that is very enjoyable in the first half or so of the film. But then we get to the second half and things begin to go off the rails, and not in a good way. Perhaps worst of all, it starts to become painfully repetitive. It wants to be this grand indictment of class/wealth and an allegory about American racism, but the social commentary is never pointed enough to really make an impact. We’ve seen a lot of genre movies lately infused with similar social commentary, and normally that’s a thing I love. But when it becomes a thing we see this frequently, a movie really needs to be doing something all its spiritual siblings are not, and They Will Kill You fails to really stand out in the crowd.

First though I’ll say, They Will Kill You is a great showcase for all the great Zazie Beetz can do. A standout in the Deadpool movies, we know Beetz is capable as an action star, but so much more is demanded of her physically in this film. And I almost want to say she makes it all look easy, but it’s clear this role took a significant amount of training and physical preparation. She’s an action powerhouse, fierce, ferocious and full of rage, and she’s exciting to watch even when the movie around her begins to fall apart. She’s clearly having fun with the material, but unfortunately she’s not enough to save the film from collapsing under itself.

We have some fun performances in our supporting cast, but nothing that really elevates the whole thing very much. Patricia Arquette is doing a super campy Irish accent that comes and goes, and she seems to be enjoying herself, which is the nicest thing I can say about her performance. I did very much enjoy Paterson Joseph as her long-suffering husband, who attempts to help Asia. Myha’la, who previously made a strong impression in the (far better) horror comedy film Bodies Bodies Bodies, doesn’t really get very much to do here. We also have Tom Felton and Heather Graham playing members of the satanic cult, and they’re never taking this too seriously, and they’re fun to watch. Nobody in this cast aside from Beetz is really given adequate space to really make a character their own, but also everyone but her is also kind of beside the point. 

The following might be considered a spoiler, but it’s something we learn in the first 20 minutes of the film, and I need to say this to explain why the film doesn’t work as a whole. So, if you’re touchy about this kind of thing, maybe skip this paragraph. The demonic cult at the center of this movie has made a deal with the devil, trading human sacrifices for immortality. So basically, nobody here can really die, and no matter how brutally Zazie Beetz kills them, they keep coming back. This robs the movie of dramatic stakes almost entirely. Asia is constantly being hunted by this cult, and is always in peril, but when she keeps having to fight the same people, it starts to feel like we’re just watching the same fight scene happen over and over again, and after awhile that becomes exhausting. 

Stylistically, Sokolov is clearly finding a lot of inspiration from Sam Raimi and Quentin Tarantino, specifically from the Evil Dead and Kill Bill movies, respectively. One of my toxic traits is that I love the Kill Bill movies. I watched them when I was way too young to see them, and I still enjoy them to this day. But the thing about Tarantino is he was always the third or fourth filmmaker to try something, but people still would talk about him like he was this creative genius. Kill Bill, itself, took a lot of inspiration from 1970s Japanese action films and spaghetti westerns. There’s a lot of the same style on display in They Will Kill You, but that style is kind of all the movie has. 

Cinematographer Isaac Bauman shoots this with a lot of energy and intensity. The camera will sit on a fight scene and let it organically play out, and this makes a lot of the fight sequences pop. This is refreshing considering so many action movies do a lot of cutting during fight sequences, presumably because the actors didn’t have enough time to adequately rehearse the fight choreography, and the cinematographer and editing team can sneakily hide this. This is also frustratingly common lately in musical films, during big production numbers. The ludicrousness and absurdity of these fight scenes gives them a really fun energy for a long time, until you realize you’re essentially watching the same fight sequence over and over again. There’s a really good fight scene mid-movie, set in a dark room, involving the Beetz character wielding an axe that is set on fire. It’s less exciting when you realize that’s probably the best this movie has to offer. 

Overall, I liked about half of what was happening in They Will Kill You. There’s a lot of style, a lot of specificity in that style, and the film is ultimately aiming for something entirely different from a lot of other ‘eat the rich’ horror/comedies as of late. So, it’s got that going for it. The film itself is entertaining and thrilling for awhile, but has significant trouble maintaining its momentum, even with an abbreviated 90-minute runtime. The fight scenes are fun until they’re not, the story is interesting until it leans too heavily into the preposterous, and becomes impossible to take seriously. If you want to go to this film just to enjoy some truly bizarre, gonzo fight sequences, you could certainly do worse, but They Will Kill You never quite slays.