They will certainly try
dir: Kirill Sokolov
2026
The title sounds like either a threat or a warning, but it’s in no way accurate in terms of the movie it exists as the title for. A more accurate and less comprehensible at first title would be You Will Have to Kill Them Over and Over Again. Because that’s literally what happens.
And yet I still wouldn’t have advised that, because if there’s one thing I hate in film titles, and there are lots of things I hate about film titles, it’s excessive literalism.
Although Plane still amuses me to this day. That film was about a plane, don’t you know?
No, They Will Kill You is pretty much the same film as either of the Ready Or Nots, either one, but released at the same time as the sequel, so there could be some spite involved. Never underestimate the power of spite. It’s a powerful motivator.
It gets shit done. Both flicks are about a bunch of devil worshippers trying to kill one person, and then two persons, who happen to be sisters. Both have estranged sisters as their main characters, who have to resolve their longstanding resentments / guilt in order to survive long enough to reconcile. Both flicks have siblings protagonists at the mercy of the supernatural, but who manipulate their dire circumstances in order to survive (and thrive) at the end, damning their enemies.
Both have lots of violence, but They Will Kill You has the better action sequences, and by ‘better’ I mean it has action sequences that are so violent that they’re cartoonish. If you’re of a certain age you’d watch something like this and see all the influences, but try and keep it currentish by saying the makers have definitely watched and taken notes from Kill Bill, as if any of that wasn’t ripped off from other HK and Japanese flicks, but also the Sam Raimi Evil Dead movies.
This flick leans more into the horror genre, seeing as there are lots of opportunities to do terrible things to people’s bodies when magic makes them reform and reconstruct (so you can do it all again).
Zazie Beetz plays the lead role here, and it’s nice to see someone playing this kind of role who’s not a 90-lb dyed blonde waif with dark eyebrows for once. The other difference is that her character of Asia Reaves isn’t ‘here’ against her will: she wants to be here, she wants to kill these fuckers, in order to find her sister Maria (Myha’la).
If you’re a fan of the brutal finance bro / sis series Industry then you probably best know Myha’la from her caustic role as Harper, but here she’s nowhere near as vicious despite playing a maid drafted into a devil worshipping cult.
The ‘here’ referred to earlier is a building called The Virgil, which stands as a one-hundred year old temple intended to please his dark majesty The Devil, who seems to be getting oodlles of work lately.
In The Virgil there’s a whole bunch of people who, I guess, live there, hang out there? And they’ve made some kind of deal with the red dude, giving them immortality as long as they keep sacrificing innocent in His name.
Heather Graham is one of them. I wasn’t entirely sure if she was playing a character or herself. It would explain how she remains so youthful and murderous. She spends a lot of the film with her head blown into fragments or variously being decapitated and disarticulated.
Tom Felton, continuing his legacy as the dreary villain Draco Malfoy from those endless Potter flicks, can only play villains because I think that’s solely what people will hire him for. Here he plays one of the many people trying to kill Asia, except he gets numerous polite lines of dialogue, unlike the majority of the jerks. In charge of the hotel/ building and the jerks is the imperious Lilith (Patricia Arquette), who’s not that different than the icy manager / helpful neighbour character she plays in Severance. She is meant to be slightly more sympathetic here because she has a Black husband (Paterson Joseph), with whom it’s implied strongly, or maybe they just say it all explicitly in dialogue, the racism in 1900s New York made the Virgil a necessary haven for them, even if they had to kill people in order to be safe.
If she is in any way sympathetic, the final boss fight between herself and Asia where she dons a demonically possessed pig’s head (!) dispels any and all ambiguous feelings we might have experienced.
It’s hard to ignore the goofiness woven into the fabric of the film. I guess it needs the goofiness in order to launch itself into the stratosphere with fights that make no sense outside of the context of a bunch of people are only there to be chopped up or shot in the face, but it rarely if ever feels that serious. It’s too “funny / cool” to be serious.
I don’t know what else this Russian director has made (looks up other films made by same director) oh, okay, yeah now I get it. This young chap has been making dark, violent movies for a while, which is no surprise considering where he comes from and what Putin has been doing to his country for all that time. How he scored this Hollywood job is a magical mystery, but I guess they wanted someone who could film some highly violent nonsense in service of this story, and he definitely delivered.
This isn’t really on a par with some of the action masterpieces it’s trying to recall, but it’s plenty good enough, and it’s trading on more of a goofy house of horrors / the sordid lives of the Epstein class and the poor people they exploit kind of thing anyway rather than being pure ovaries-to-the-wall action.
As class warfare goes, it’s hardly a stinging indictment of the wealthy and their endless capacity from extracting everything they can from those unfortunate enough to come under their sway. The mission statement Lilith keeps repeating is that when the Virgil was first built, that part of New York was beset on all sides by the iniquity of evil people, real criminal scum of the Earth types.
You know, Italians or something like that. By sacrificing those people, the Virgil created a haven for the wealthy, the talented, the naturally better. But when they ran out of the crims, they seem to have pivoted to “fuck it, just find some dark skinned women”.
But even further they would argue, all they’re doing is offering these women an opportunity to work hard and sacrifice some other dark skinned person in their place in order to get ahead, become immortal, but still keep cleaning toilets and mopping floors so that the wealthy people don’t have to.
You see? Entrepreneurship, resourcefulness, a desire to help the broader community, all noble aspirations.
And if a few thousand people have to be sacrificed to a pig demon, well, you can’t make omelettes without poor people suffering, that’s just one of those iron clad laws of reality.
Zazie Beetz goes full throttle on this one. I don’t know if the flick makes the convincing argument that ten years of prison and an iron will has twisted her into an effective killing machine (of rich people), but it worked for me. Other films have showcased her talents as a dramatic actress, but this one relies mostly on her comedic timing and her willingness to throw herself into her work, which here involves a lot of butchery, and she’s more than up to the task.
Myha’la’s part isn’t as flashy, since she looks and acts like a surly maid for much of her screentime, but she is far less salty and sarcastic here than she’s been in everything else I’ve ever seen her in, which is a shame. Everyone has their talents, and hers is being extremely annoying to older people, triggering flashes of boomer anti-millennial rage.
Yes I clearly watched this and Ready or Not Here I Come back to back just so I could write and post the two reviews back to back, and I would make the argument that it was a worthwhile use of my time. They Will Kill You is easily the better of the two flicks, despite having almost identical plots and characters and story beats. Same villains, same entitlement mentality, same comeuppance for those who think wealth and demonic favour will protect them forever.
It’s just more fun this time out. This one isn’t trapped in a format, and it felt more comfortable going crazy / insane in its ending, which comes after a bonkers and surreal journey of extreme violence and Halloween seriousness level of horror.
7 times I bet you the sequel will be called They Will Kill You Two out of 10 or there is no justice in this or any other universe.
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“What happened?
- “Rich people.” – thank you Angus Sampson for that - They Will Kill You
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