Flasz On Film

As I was sitting down to write the opening paragraph to whatever this text turns into, I was overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu, because it seems to me that at least once a fortnight I get to plop down a thousand words on the subject of eat-the-rich satires (see my work on How to Make a Killing and No Other Choice, spaced just days apart). As a matter of fact, right after I finish writing this text, I am about to head out to see Ready or Not 2: Here I Come which is very much a satirically-slanted action horror in this very space.

At this point I might be developing mild anxiety over this. What if I open a tin of tuna and find an eat-the-rich satire in there instead of what’s on the label?

Nevertheless, here I am trying to make sense of They Will Kill You, a brand-new movie that looks as though it wanted to elbow some living space among the likes of The Menu, The Hunt, Ready or Not and the like. Directed an co-written by Kirill Sokolov, for whom this movie counts as his Hollywood debut, this movie looks as though it fit the bill. A young woman Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) enters a gloomy-looking hotel called The Virgil in the middle of New York, looking to get hired as a maid. However, it quickly turns out that the hotel is not a regular establishment but a home to a Satanic cult run by a caste of rich snobs who occasionally lure people off the street with a promise of a job only to sacrifice them in exchange for immortality. Problem is that Asia is not a regular little nobody but a skilled martial artist who is as dangerous with sharp instruments as she is unwilling to be murdered on her first night at The Virgil. Carnage ensues.

Based on this quickly-concocted description of what They Will Kill You is roughly about you should be able to connect the dots and see where specific thematic nodes have been planted within the narrative, so that the whole thing could function as a satirical takedown of the billionaire class. There’s very little mystery here in this regard and if you were to be looking for a fight, you might as well accuse the movie of complete lack of originality as well. After all, we have literally seen it all before and you might be inclined to think that this is one of those films that came together in a meeting where a sizable crowd of participants all contributed ideas by writing them on post-it notes and then the producers passed them onto the screenwriter and the director with a diktat of making sure that all bases were covered.

But doing so would be quite unfair because They Will Kill You doesn’t just want to be a merger of an eat-the-rich satire with a survival horror. In fact, it pools inspirations from other places in an attempt to fashion a solid ninety minutes of entertainment that is openly and unapologetically familiar in tone, structure and aesthetics while also remaining fundamentally effective, thrilling and fun.

Therefore, if you watch this movie and think that some sequences look as though they were taken out of John Wick movies, you’re probably right. If the structure of the movie in which Asia traverses the floors of The Virgil as though they were levels in a video game or a wink at The Raid and Dredd, then it should track as well. If a scene where Asia is greeted by the hotel superintendent (played by Patricia Arquette) in the pouring rain reminds you of Suspiria, it is also probably not an accident. A handful of scenes staged to look reminiscent of platformer games or arcade fighting games in which the character constantly walks right while encountering new opponents is here on purpose too. In fact, if you want to look for movie comparisons, you don’t have to look further than Oldboy and its iconic single-take fight scene as inspirational for this film. And all these seemingly disparate elements of inspiration are held together with what I can only see as the filmmaker’s unapologetic love for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Between the many specific shots, title cards, crash zooms, specifically hyper-stylized violence and requisite fountains of atomized blood spurting from decapitated corpses—not to mention frequent close-up shots of Zazie Beetz’s feet—there is absolutely no denying that They Will Kill You is designed to function as a genre medley loosely projected onto that eat-the-rich micro-genre template, in the style of Tarantino’s opus of revenge with swords and kung fu. Thus, literally none of the film’s constituent elements register as original. But that’s all fine because this combination of thereof might be. This movie’s patented formula is not a specific stylistic or tonal ingredient but rather a recipe complete with ratios and percentages of styles used to mixed everything together.

This entire movie looks as though it was made to function like a derivative of a Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez project from roughly twenty years ago. Imagine Rosemary’s Baby meeting The Raid but mixed like Planet Terror and draped over top of Ready or Not. You’d get close. Therefore, since originality or inventiveness is only always going to be of the second-order kind—after all homaging Tarantino equates to inadvertently homaging what Tarantino homaged in his homage medleys—a movie like They Will Kill You has only one recourse. It needs to be fun to watch.

And it is. Well… until it isn’t.

Charitably, the vast majority of the running time in which we hang onto Asia’s shoulder as she cuts and slashes her way through numerous opponents—barefoot, naturally—are appropriately exhilarating, filled with tongue-in-cheek levity and gross-out over-the-topness that gives the movie a whiff or ridiculous frivolity. It’s just fun to look at well-choreographed and uber-hyper-stylized fight sequences that clearly hark back to Uma Thurman’s skirmishes in the House of Blue Leaves, especially since the filmmakers seem to have had just as much fun putting them together. Everything’s just a little bit quirky and therefore the satirical reading also doesn’t register as tired, despite the fact the very same ideas have been already beaten to death in the same genre space. But as I said—this is a medley and lack of originality is not an issue.

The only problems truly surface towards the end of the film where the story must wrestle with its own ridiculousness or ignore it completely. Because the narrative is structured to resemble a video game with different, visually distinct levels, events are predictably all building up towards what’s going to be a boss fight. Which is where—much like many modern genre films—this story somehow defaults to convention and serves a climax that is just a bit pedestrian in execution, especially in comparison to what came before it. Somewhere in the final act the Tarantino-meets-Rodriguez ridiculousness is toned down because the story wants to have the cake and eat it in order to give the viewer a Hollywood ending… which quite frankly would have been better if, in a straight-up horror tradition, some characters didn’t make it out alive. But alas, you can’t have everything. The film wobbles upon landing and loses marks for style.

Even so, They Will Kill You adds up to a surprisingly satisfying and fundamentally entertaining experience that marries primary exhilaration on the back of its genre obligations with the filmmakers’ own proclivity to tip the hat to a whole host of preceding work… which also gives the viewer an opportunity to play a little bit of “Where’s Waldo” of movie trivia.