Format: Streaming video from HBO on various players.
Tropes and basic plots exist for a reason: they work. They serve as a sort of shorthand for character and plot. We can pick up a lot of basic truths about a story or a character quickly, and this also serves as a way for creators to subvert those tropes. Haunted house stories work the same basic way—people are trapped in a house and are unable to leave and are pursued and often killed by the thing (or things) haunting the house. Alien and Event Horizon are really just haunted house movies in space. Ready or Not subverted the genre by giving us a single victim being pursued by everyone else. They Will Kill You does the same basic thing.
I mean that sincerely. They Will Kill You is an almost spiritual sequel of Ready or Not, and it’s not much of a coincidence that they came out at virtually the same time. We’re going to have one motivated person against a crew that wants to get rid of her and there’s going to be plenty of Satan along for the ride.
We start in the past, with Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) and her younger sister Maria (Orefile Moloi initially, then Myha’la later on) are escaping their abusive father. It’s hinted that he is sexually abusive toward Maria and probably was with Asia in the past. The two attempt to get away, but when they are cornered, Asia shoots him and is then dragged off to prison for 10 years for attempted murder, since the bastard lives.
Ten years later, Asia is out of prison and has arrived at The Virgil, a towering apartment building in New York City, having enlisted the assistance of a private investigator (Angus Sampson) to find Maria. Asia is planning to pose as the newest member of the cleaning staff in the hopes of locating her sister and reuniting with her. However, it’s clear soon enough that The Virgil is something much more than it pretends to be. That night, Asia is attacked in her room by a group of people wearing pig masks, who are surprised that she knows how to fight and does so with reckless abandon and intent to kill. In fact, she manages to kill off all four of her assailants.
At least for the moment that’s the case. Asia discovers soon enough that The Virgil is not merely a building for the extremely wealthy, but for an extremely wealthy Satanic cult. All of the residents of the building and many of the staff have pledged themselves to Satan. In return, and with the cost of a human sacrifice, they are given immortality. This means that when Asia guts someone, cuts off their head, or obliterates them with close-range shotgun blasts, their deaths are merely temporary. They’re going to come back, with full memory of what happened and with full memory of the pain Asia caused them. As it happens, there’s a ceremony planned for that night, and Asia is going to be the sacrifice, which means that she’s no longer just looking for her sister, she’s fighting for both of their lives.
As mentioned above, in a lot of ways, this is a variation on Ready or Not. Everyone in the building will be eventually hunting Asia and while the immortality is new, the fact that we have someone fighting for her life against a very motivated crew of people is certainly not. So we need to look at the differences or what They Will Kill You brings to the table.
First is the gore. There’s not going to be a lot of guts here but there are absolute buckets of blood. Asia frequently arms herself with a machete or an axe, and body parts are going to go flying. This is always going to be accompanied by significant arterial spray. It’s over-the-top and initially surprising, but it’s also often played for comedy. The first time you watch someone pick up their own head and put it back on their shoulders, it’s nearly impossible not to laugh. It’s pitched in just the right angle to make what is happening darkly funny rather than sinister, and it wouldn’t be hard to make this sinister.
It’s also filled with action sequences. The fight choreography is fantastic, inventive, and fun. One huge set piece involves Asia fighting a series of attackers with a flaming axe. The choreography is also film in a style much more in keeping with allowing the audience to see all of the action happening. Rather than the “action movie” style of close-ups of hand-to-hand fighting and quick cuts making fights chaos that are nearly impossible to follow, most of the fights are filmed at a middle distance, allowing us to see the combatants and follow exactly what is happening.
There’s a lot here that feels a bit like retread in terms of action movies, horror movies, and horror comedies. That said, The Will Kill You is clearly having fun with what it wants to do and with the cast. It’s a film that is happy to play with that cast as well, giving known names and faces roles that are vaguely prominent in the story in the sense that they show up a lot, but that are in many ways indistinguishable from a lot of the other characters. Patricia Arquette is in charge of the servants, but the house residents and attackers include Tom Felton and Heather Graham, who are clearly having a lot of fun with this.
They Will Kill You isn’t going to rewrite anything in terms of film or narrative, but not every roller coaster needs to be more than just a fun ride, too.
Why to watch They Will Kill You: Fun fight sequences
Why not to watch: It’s Ready or Not, more or less.
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