Our offering is on the loose.
Main Cast: Zazie Beetz, Patricia Arquette
Director: Kirill Sokolov
We were sitting at home last week minding our own business when a friend of ours texted a link to a movie trailer on YouTube claiming, “Watching this now. It’s great!”
Well he and I have similar taste in movies, so my wife and I watched the trailer and agreed this looks like a fun movie. So we watched it. Fun is an understatement; Kirill Sokolov’s THEY WILL KILL YOU was a blast.
Part DEADPOOL, part READY OR NOT, the story takes place in one night in The Virgil, an exclusive New York hotel that caters only to the richest of the rich. On this particular night, they’re welcoming their new housekeeper, Isabelle. Unbeknownst to Isabelle, she’s to be the yearly offering made by the hotel’s residents to maintain their immortality.
Unbeknownst to the “family” in the hotel, Isabelle is really an ex-inmate named Asia Reaves, and she’s come to find her sister, Maria, who was last seen entering The Virgil. And Asia is not to be taken lightly; she’s come bearing gifts: a sawed-off shotgun, a machette, and years of fighting prowess learned in prison.
What follows is 90 minutes of action, 90 minutes of blood and gore, and 90 minutes of the most insanely silly visual gags I’ve seen in a long time. THEY WILL KILL YOU was, as I said, a friggin’ blast.
Zazie Beetz as Asia Reaves brings an energy to every scene that can only be described as a middle finger aimed at a world that’s been holding her down at every turn. She’s not asking for much, she just wants her sister, and a horde of immortal rich scum isn’t going to stand in her way.
Meanwhile on the other end of the fight, we’ve got Heather Graham and Tom Felton as members of The Family, soldiers in the army sent to bring Asia back alive so they can sacrifice her before dawn. I’ve been a fan of Felton since his turn on The Flash, a performance that started off rough but won me over in the end, while Graham has been making the rounds of indie horror the last few years with parts in SUITABLE FLESH and ORACLE. Both are hilarious in their deadly serious attitude toward Asia amid the insanity going on around them. I never thought I’d see Roller Girl taking part in a Park Chan-wook-inspired fight scene coupled with Tarantino-style blood geysers. And it wasn’t just the one scene; this movie is packed full of them from start to finish.
And then there’s the matriarch of The Family, portrayed by Patricia Arquette who just seems to be having the time of her life over the last decade, playing the worst of the worst (Tilly Mitchell in Escape at Dannemora, Dee Dee Blanchard in The Act, Harmony Cobel in Severance). She plays the straightlaced immortal Lily Woodhouse this time, a buttoned up woman who’s over a hundred years old but still understands how to use a group chat and isn’t above getting in on the action herself when necessary.
I don’t know what kind of movie diet Sokolov was raised on in Saint Petersburg, but he’s used those influences to make one of the most memorable movie-watching experiences my wife and I have had in a long time. I thought I had had my fill the last few years of horror comedies and was just looking for straight horror that might leave an impression. I guess all I really needed was someone to come along with an inspired idea, an inspired style, and some truly inspired casting choices to remind me just how much fun this genre can be. THEY WILL KILL YOU is currently streaming on HBO and is highly recommended.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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