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What is it about New York City hotels and grand old apartment buildings? Most of them are haunted anyway, but in the hands of Hollywood and various other filmmakers, they become positively demonic. From Polanski’s Dakota on the Upper West Side in Rosemary’s Baby to the Continental that Keanu Reeves keeps checking into, but never seems to leave in all those John Wicks, luxury Manhattan space is synonymous with murder and monsters. And in writer-director Kirill Sokolov’s They Will Kill You, there’s so many of each that one speculates the cleaning bill must be in the eight or nine figures.
Although there’s (some) story logic to that in this one. See, Zazie Beetz’s Asia Reaves is technically taking on a want ad when she shows up on a rainy night at the Virgil, a posh NYC haunt that looks like it’s situated somewhere on the corner between Greenwich Village and South Africa tax incentives. It is there that an ex-convict as nominally desperate as Asia takes a job where she will work under a peculiar Irish superintendent named Lilith Woodhouse—Patricia Arquette doing a bit that crosses somewhere between Mary Reilly and Darby O’Gill. Lilith’s stern demeanor seems to suggest the turnover rate should be high, and the tenants do nothing to dissuade this notion since most of them are played by familiar faces as snobby kooks (Heather Graham) or sketchy lechers (Tom Felton).
All of it feels a lot like they’re putting on a bit, and that’s because they are. They Will Kill You barely wastes 15 minutes before the creeps and cretins try to harass and sacrifice the new maid, which we soon learn is their wont. Like the Virgil’s namesake, this building knows its way around Hell, with a landlord in the basement who is nothing less than an absolute devil. It might sound spooky, but in practice it’s a little more diabolical than Scooby-Doo.
This in spite of aesthetic happily reaching—anxiously, even—for Tarantino at his most Grand Guignol in the Kill Bill bloodbaths. The fight scenes between Beetz, Felton, and even a possessed Arquette at one point (or at least a committed stunt double) rely on voluminous splatter effects erupting like geysers, and smartass-cool kid talk and posturing, a la the samurai lighter Beetz carries around and later shares with her long-lost sister (Myha’la), who as luck would have it also has a room in this den of inequity.
One cannot envy either Sokolov or Warner Bros. with the release of They Will Kill You. While movies about Satanic cults among the rich and moneyed are nothing new, even back when Radio Silence gave it fresh devilish coat of paint in Ready or Not, one imagines no one making Kill You could have guessed that Radio Silence’s Ready or Not 2 would also feature estranged sisters—or that Searchlight would move its release date up to March 20 so as to beat Sokolov’s film to market (not that either may find much stall space with Project Hail Mary continues to make its orbiting rounds). Worse still, both opened at SXSW, with the better of the two premiering first. It wasn’t They Will Kill You.
While Sokolov’s action sequences and fight choreography seem much more elaborately staged and meticulously designed than either Ready or Not, its social commentary amounts to more of a single, trailing off sentence, and its eat-the-rich table-setting adorned with mostly empty dishes. Others feature mere plastic fruit to gnaw on. Even the sisterly dynamic with performers as charming as Beetz and Myha’la proves threadbare.
Not that there isn’t some base thrill to be had in the Virgil. A handful of fight sequences along barren halls proves the architecture isn’t the only thing that’s brutalist in this place. And the fiendish glee with which Sokolov’s picture reveals how the pampered and privileged earn their immortality in this joint is the kind of gonzo gag that 20 years ago would have been the pride and joy of a grindhouse throwback dropped by Dimension Films.
There is an audience for They Will Kill You, but there’s just not enough tainted meat on this Satanic beast to ever earn a real cult following of its own.
They Will Kill You premiered at SXSW on March 17 and opens nationwide on March 27.
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