They Will Kill You is a Hilariously Entertaining Horror Film with a Plethora of Ideas It Tries to Execute

Originality is sometimes merely a matter of attitude, which concerns not only what one wants to say, but also how, with what assumptions, and with how much eagerness to do so. There is no more fitting example than They Will Kill You, a film that on paper is derivative of both the recent past and a few decades further back. As soon as its heroine, played by Zazie Beetz, draws a sword and begins to dismember opponents, the mind immediately races to Quentin Tarantino's two Kill Bill films, later evoked by a fight in the “snow” of an underground freezer.

It's a bit of all of early Tarantino cinema and that of his friend Robert Rodriguez that is evoked by the film's approach: partly because it looks to blaxploitation and the splatter films of the decades plundered by Tarantino in the composition of his style, partly because enough time has passed since the reinterpretations of the Pulp Fiction director to allow his colleague and co-screenwriter Kirill Sokolov to, in turn, say that he did not copy, but rather paid homage to his predecessor.

They Will Kill You Confirms That the Super Rich Are the New Super Villains

The references and identifiable derivations in They Will Kill You, however, also look to the recent past of the horror genre, which seems curiously fixated on films featuring the ultra-rich 1% of the world's population as villains, often portrayed with grotesque and vampiric traits. A new class of ultra-bad villains with bad taste, devoid of charisma or charm, who not only exploit the rest of the population (especially those in positions of great disadvantage and difficulty), but go so far as to hunt and kill the unfortunates who end up in their employ.

The super-rich as super-vacuous super-villains, to be transformed into a target on which to unleash not only the genre's inherent violence, but also society's systemic violence. Therefore, films like The Menu, The Hunt, but especially Ready or Not are clearly a starting point and reference for the very lean, snappy plot of They Will Kill You, which truly seems like a budget copy of the latter, faithfully echoing its premise. Asia (Zazie Beetz) is, in theory, an unwitting sacrificial victim who, hired as a maid at the prestigious Virgil hotel, soon discovers that it is inhabited only by immortal Satan worshippers who, to keep themselves from death, must periodically sacrifice an innocent to the Beast.

Except that, even without knowing the history of the Virgil and its true purposes, Asia didn't end up there by chance and isn't exactly a helpless maid. She has her own plan, her own objective, and a suitcase full of weapons to achieve them. If she's forced to get her hands dirty to get what she wants, all the better for her, for us viewers, and for the film. As Patricia Arquette, who maintains the role of a sinister and inflexible administrator after Severance, aptly summarizes, Asia is “a avenger,” much like the Tarantino bride. Her creator therefore presents her with the most delicious premise for an action and revenge lover: her enemies are immortal, which means that, one plan and one confrontation after another, Asia will have to deal with hordes of enemies, using all her hand-to-hand combat techniques, firearms, and any object she finds at hand.

The Plot of They Will Kill You is Functional to its Action Vocation

The film is truly all about this: Asia wants to complete a certain task and to do so she must enter and exit the Virgil alive, while the inhabitants of the luxurious hotel need to sacrifice her to Satan by dawn to maintain their immortal status. What follows is an endless series of verbal and physical confrontations characterized by the very structured and well-furnished spaces of the hotel, which Kirill Sokolov transforms into truly delightful variations on the theme, moving from the voyeuristic to the openly splatter.

There is, for example, a very long scene set in a restaurant dining room in deep gloom, illuminated only by an axe that the protagonist has set on fire and by the occasional burning corpse. The film moves to the rhythm of music in highly choreographed sequences, where the use of slow motion and the positioning of the camera, as well as its movement among the fighters, interrupting their rhythm and soundtrack, are part of the combat itself.

The tone, however, rather than dark or horror, is one of dark humor and playful exaggeration, with an improbable amount of blood gushing from a cleanly severed head: there's even a bit of slapstick, with an eyeball going on a mission to spy on the protagonist. There's a long segment, for example, where Asia, on all fours, tries to escape through the labyrinthine air ducts, pursued by an opponent whose head she has destroyed and who therefore cannot see her.