Kill List

Sometimes God's love can be hard to swallow.

A super slice of sub-urban horror crafted by Ben Wheatley, Kill List blends a number of classic British films but still remains very much its own beast. And what a beast it is. Part hit-man thriller and part Wicker Man pagan horror, plot spins hit-man for hire Jay (Neil Maskell) out of his troubled domestic funk, into a world of pain and misery. Taking on a job, he, along with his partner Gal (Michael Smiley), is given a list of names for them to track and terminate. The people and the places they confront are the darkest kind, which brings out Jay's black heart as well. All this while lurking around the edges of the frame is something mysterious, something that will bring Jay to his destiny.

There is a rawness to Kill List that strikes hard, a sort of real life documentary feel that marries up with the black material to chill the bones. It's proud of its grimness, even what humour exists within just feels like damaged goods. The sound and camera work gleefully add to the unsettling atmosphere, tactics which help alleviate the feeling that we are once again watching a formulaic British thriller with ideas above its station. But then the curve ball arrives and hits you on the head, bringing dizzy spells and some delirium. Which builds to a finale that will either leave you breathless or angry, but either way Kill List will not be ignored.

Impressively performed by the cast, mounted with skill by Wheatley, this is a dark hearted British treasure that hopefully in time will be afforded the praise it deserves. 8/10

A bit tough to understand on the first watch, yet gripping and a compelling portrayal of inner demons.

But seriously, are the British the only film-makers who can make a decent crime/thriller film??

Rubbi... Wait, people love this?

Before I started my review, I decided to take a quick look at the Letterboxd reviews. I always play a minigame in my head by attempting to guess the average rating, for example for the last film I watched - <em>'Jack the Giant Slayer'</em> - I called it spot on at 2.4. This I genuinely predicted less than 2.0... it's at 3.5! To tell you I was flabbergasted would be an understatement.

There have been films in the past when my thoughts are the opposite (both positively and negatively) to the majority elsewhere, but I think this one takes the crown as the most polarizing so far. I just didn't like this 2011 release at all, there's one good piece of violence involving a hammer and a head (not like that, ichthyologists) but otherwise I found it all super underwhelming.

I hadn't heard of <em>'Kill List'</em> prior to watching it, I only decided to do so as I noticed it had Neil Maskell in it and I loved his performance a decade ago in television's <em>'Utopia'</em> - which is of similar ilk to this actually, just as violent but miles, miles greater. Those behind/alongside Maskell didn't get my approval either, with only the aforementioned violence keeping my attention.

I could sense a promising concept in there (which I guess many others actually did see, evidently), though this honestly didn't do anything for me all the way through. I sit here flummoxed reading other reviews, even the Wikipedia 'reception' section is all-out gushing about it too. Did Prime Video play me the wrong movie?!

Just noticed that this has the same director as 2016's <em>'Free Fire'</em> (which I rated 6/10), which is a good example of what I mentioned earlier in regards to my thoughts sometimes being a noticeable difference to the majority (fairly uncommon, fwiw). Maybe I just don't like Ben Wheatley movies?

*Kill List*’s cleverest trick is not that it turns into a folk-horror film. It is that, by the time the masks and torches arrive, it has quietly made the case that Jay has been inside one all along.

For much of the film Ben Wheatley shoots his world like grubby domestic reportage: handheld cameras, naturalistic light, awkward rooms, rows about money, men trying to recover some idea of usefulness through work they are spectacularly ill-suited to describe at parents’ evening. Jay and Gal are contract killers, but the film initially treats that almost as another miserable freelance occupation. The violence is not. When it comes, Wheatley refuses the comforting cutaway, and Jay’s fury starts to look less like professional brutality than something being deliberately fed.

That is where the odd details begin to matter. A priest thanks Jay before dying. The librarian appears to recognise something in him that Jay does not. Fiona scratches a sigil behind a mirror, then later appears as an unexplained figure outside the hotel. The man commissioning the job cuts Jay’s hand, and even the doctor who examines the resulting mess behaves as though the obvious physical evidence is beside the point. None of these things explains the conspiracy. Together they make the more disturbing suggestion that Jay is not uncovering a hidden system but being processed by it.

The final shift into woodland ritual therefore works precisely because it is both sudden and not sudden at all. The film changes clothes, but not direction. Best of all, Wheatley has already shown us a grotesque rehearsal: early on, Jay play-fights with his son while the boy rides on his mother’s back. The shape of the ending has been sitting in the garden from almost the beginning.

Whether every piece of the machinery fits is less important than the feeling that there is a much larger folk-horror film happening just out of sight. *Kill List* gives us only the part where one damaged man wanders across its path, mistakes manipulation for agency, and discovers too late that everyone else seems to have read the script.

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Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com

Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Kill List: folknhell com/kill-list-review along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes.