They Will Kill You
It was self-defence, but he was a white man and she wasn’t, and leaving her sister behind she ran from the scene, enough to confirm her guilt and while their father survived the bullet the verdict was inevitable, Asia Reaves sentenced to ten years in prison where she learned to be tougher than she had ever been before, the only thing she hasn’t been able to learn the whereabouts of Maria, hiring a private detective on her release and tracking her sister to a prestigious apartment block where she works as a maid.
The Virgil having stood for a century, Asia poses as a new employee to get past the cold greeting of building manager Lilith Woodhouse, but there are reasons for their prosperity and longevity of the residents in a neighbourhood where people simply vanish, the ornate cast bronze doors opening on a regimented hierarchy of servants downstairs and a masked and cloaked Satanic cult upstairs, offering sacrifice in return for immortality with those on the lower rungs able to step up on the rare occasions a vacancy opens, the hunted becoming the hunter.
Director Kirill Sokolov’s English language debut, They Will Kill You builds upon the manic energy of his feature debut Why Don’t You Just Die!, expanding it from a single Moscow apartment acting as a battleground to an entire New York building, from the entrance lobby and locked doors of the servants’ quarters through the warren of tunnels behind the walls and up to the attic altar where candles burn and blood flows, Deadpool 2’s Zazie Beetz the underestimated domestic help who travels with a suitcase full of weapons, expecting trouble and ready for it.
A class war where the endless rain washes nothing clean and the rich tempt the poor to turn on each other for the chance to be accepted, Lost Highway’s Patricia Arquette is Lilith, a woman who fought her way to the top alongside The Leftovers’ Paterson Joseph as husband Ray, now having doubts and offering the titular line to Asia in a bungled warning, with Lost in Space’s Heather and Origin’s Tom Felton as increasingly frustrated and bruised cultists Sharon and Kevin and Bodies Bodies Bodies’ Myha’la as Maria, no longer the child Asia failed to protect.
Paralleling the structure and style of Why Don’t You Just Die!, anything can become a weapon in the right hands and the laws of physics cease to apply at the door, the camera right inside action often shot in continuous take as Asia is pursued through the Virgil by regenerating resurrecting cultists in a series of comic book encounters, amputations and decapitations only slowing the pursuers so much as it impacts their locomotion or awareness of the environment, not much help when the tunnel only runs one way.
More akin to the original Ready or Not than its disappointing sequel despite both being built around the reunion of estranged sisters, the showers of blood and stunt work largely practical, the only misstep in the immaculately choreographed footwork of Asia’s otherwise flawless one-woman crusade is the final scene where the “big bad” is embodied digitally, unnecessary when a physical prop, even inanimate, would have been both more realistic and funnier.
They Will Kill You is currently on general release
