Kill List
Writers: Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump
Starring: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring and Michael Smiley
Starring: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring and Michael Smiley
After having watched Kill List, I understand the shock and horror audiences must have felt when they first saw The Wicker Man. Directed by Ben Wheatley, Kill List is the strangest and most disturbing film of 2011, with an ending that literally dropped my jaw, a feat that was last accomplished by Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Jay is struggling financially due to an eight month off work hiatus he has taken due to the psychological and physical impacts of a job gone wrong in Kiev. His friend Gal calls him out however to deal with the people on a client’s kill list. The deeper they go into the job however, the deeper Jay descends into hell.
Kill List begins as a gritty, socio-realistic slice of life drama, as a marriage and family struggle to live harmoniously due to financial difficulties, caused by the scars of the past. A dinner scene occurs that seems to be in an entirely different film from Kill List’s later movements. It is a scene that is so real due to the dialogue, performances and close-up camera, that it does not feel like we are watching some glossy film version of people’s lives but instead that a camera was merely placed at a real dinner party. It is in that scene where we in fact learn everything we need to know about the characters and actually sets the tone for the rest of the picture despite its stark contrast to the rest of the events, which populate the film’s narrative.
The performances in this film are superb and Michael Smiley was fully deserving of his British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actor. While the fact that I had never seen any of these actors in a film before may have increased the way in which I viewed their performances, there is no doubting the work on display in this film. Neil Maskell is superb as a man completely losing his grip on his life and sanity. There is an underlying darkness to his character, which expresses itself in numerous scenes of disturbing violence. Just like Drive, this film exploits the full harmful potential of a hammer; in a much more real and therefore disturbing manner than the much more fantasized Drive.
There are comparisons to make between those two films beyond the violent use of a hammer. In both films we have protagonists with underlying problems and emotions which surface with extreme acts of violence. In both films these protagonists go deeper and deeper into a world through jobs they were reluctant to or never normally would have entered. Also both films have been criticized for their third act acts being seemingly out of step with the narrative that proceeded it, as it was in the case of Drive, this is a false accusation to label at Kill List and in fact an insult to the work done in the early stages of the film by its director Ben Wheatley.
From the very opening shot of Kill List we know that this film is not as simple as it initially appears. The sound and music throughout the whole film puts the audience at unease, even when the film is not being a horror the soundtrack that accompanies it is one that wouldn’t be amiss in The Shining. In this film, like Jeff Nichols in Take Shelter but arguably more effectively here, Ben Wheatley creates this palpable atmosphere of dread, darkness and doom that corrodes the whole film and your viewing experience of it. As much as I love films, which do this and admire what Wheatley achieved on a low budget, for numerous reasons, Kill List is not an enjoyable film to watch by any means.
In fact its unenjoyable nature and polarizing conclusion means that Kill List is a film that will be and is being hated by many. The fact that on top of those things, the film’s story is left more open than Arsenal’s defence, with the audience being left to fill in the gaps and piece together the events and meaning behind them, this is a film that asks a lot of its audience. In a year however that has been so bad for horror and a year where we have seen films of such a glossy, light, throwaway, forgettable nature, it is a strange pleasure to see a film which is so nasty, shocking, unpredictable and unforgettable. When you are not asking yourself, “What’s going on?” you will be asking, “How did this get made’” this film is the biggest argument there is for independent cinema as there is no a way a film this bonkers would have get made by a mainstream Hollywood studio.
What makes the film more chilling than other “horrors” which have come out this year, is the fact that it takes place in such a real environment. Despite the actions in the last ten minutes of the film nothing feels fake about it and it plays on real world fears. Like Take Shelter, there is also some social commentary and state of the world stuff underneath Kill List if you want to go looking for it but like Take Shelter it doesn’t shove anything down your face with its story and themes, in fact it couldn’t be more elusive in regards to just what it is really about. As a huge fan of Lost and somebody who enjoys the discussion, thinking and theorizing that comes with open, ambiguous stories, I love the fact that Kill List gives you so much to discuss with numerous clues that could be read multiple ways.
The film’s genre could also be read in multiple ways. If you pigeon holed it and advertised it as purely a horror movie, mainstream horror fans may not get it until the last twenty minutes. You couldn’t market it as a hitman movie, its a film about men who happen to be hitmen, it is hardly the films core. Then again aside from the first twenty odd minutes, it is not a family drama. Kill List meshes genres but never feels like it is doing so, it cannot be classified to one genre and instead stands as its own unique hybrid.
If you are not a fan of horror films however, don’t enjoy stories which leave plenty of room for you to think about and discuss and like to know where a movie is going, saying and why, then avoid Kill List like the plague. If however you enjoyed early day Lost, the bonkers elements of Black Swan and the strangeness and unease of such horror classics like The Wicker Man and The Shining then this film is certainly for you. I have watched the film three times in three days; once with director’s commentary and I am still trying to wrap my head around exactly what I think happened in it and exactly what I think about it.
I couldn’t recommend Kill List to anybody feeling sure that they would like it, I would be sure however that whether they liked it or not, they won’t have had a viewing experience quite like it, at least not in 2011. Overall Kill List is the strangest, scariest, most shocking, most unpredictable and most disturbing film of 2011. Ben Wheatley tremendously directs it and the cast bring a superb realism to the piece. For a film to actually make my jaw drop and to make me revisit it three times in such a short space of time when it is so tough and uncompromising means that whatever Kill List is, it is something pretty special in its own weird and wacky way. I could write an article about twice as long as this review analyzing the plot and what happened and it is that element of the film, along with its shocking ending which ensures that this is one of 2011’s more memorable films. Ultimately it provides the punch in the gut, visceral experience I had been waiting all year for.
Kill List begins as a gritty, socio-realistic slice of life drama, as a marriage and family struggle to live harmoniously due to financial difficulties, caused by the scars of the past. A dinner scene occurs that seems to be in an entirely different film from Kill List’s later movements. It is a scene that is so real due to the dialogue, performances and close-up camera, that it does not feel like we are watching some glossy film version of people’s lives but instead that a camera was merely placed at a real dinner party. It is in that scene where we in fact learn everything we need to know about the characters and actually sets the tone for the rest of the picture despite its stark contrast to the rest of the events, which populate the film’s narrative.
The performances in this film are superb and Michael Smiley was fully deserving of his British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actor. While the fact that I had never seen any of these actors in a film before may have increased the way in which I viewed their performances, there is no doubting the work on display in this film. Neil Maskell is superb as a man completely losing his grip on his life and sanity. There is an underlying darkness to his character, which expresses itself in numerous scenes of disturbing violence. Just like Drive, this film exploits the full harmful potential of a hammer; in a much more real and therefore disturbing manner than the much more fantasized Drive.
There are comparisons to make between those two films beyond the violent use of a hammer. In both films we have protagonists with underlying problems and emotions which surface with extreme acts of violence. In both films these protagonists go deeper and deeper into a world through jobs they were reluctant to or never normally would have entered. Also both films have been criticized for their third act acts being seemingly out of step with the narrative that proceeded it, as it was in the case of Drive, this is a false accusation to label at Kill List and in fact an insult to the work done in the early stages of the film by its director Ben Wheatley.
From the very opening shot of Kill List we know that this film is not as simple as it initially appears. The sound and music throughout the whole film puts the audience at unease, even when the film is not being a horror the soundtrack that accompanies it is one that wouldn’t be amiss in The Shining. In this film, like Jeff Nichols in Take Shelter but arguably more effectively here, Ben Wheatley creates this palpable atmosphere of dread, darkness and doom that corrodes the whole film and your viewing experience of it. As much as I love films, which do this and admire what Wheatley achieved on a low budget, for numerous reasons, Kill List is not an enjoyable film to watch by any means.
In fact its unenjoyable nature and polarizing conclusion means that Kill List is a film that will be and is being hated by many. The fact that on top of those things, the film’s story is left more open than Arsenal’s defence, with the audience being left to fill in the gaps and piece together the events and meaning behind them, this is a film that asks a lot of its audience. In a year however that has been so bad for horror and a year where we have seen films of such a glossy, light, throwaway, forgettable nature, it is a strange pleasure to see a film which is so nasty, shocking, unpredictable and unforgettable. When you are not asking yourself, “What’s going on?” you will be asking, “How did this get made’” this film is the biggest argument there is for independent cinema as there is no a way a film this bonkers would have get made by a mainstream Hollywood studio.
What makes the film more chilling than other “horrors” which have come out this year, is the fact that it takes place in such a real environment. Despite the actions in the last ten minutes of the film nothing feels fake about it and it plays on real world fears. Like Take Shelter, there is also some social commentary and state of the world stuff underneath Kill List if you want to go looking for it but like Take Shelter it doesn’t shove anything down your face with its story and themes, in fact it couldn’t be more elusive in regards to just what it is really about. As a huge fan of Lost and somebody who enjoys the discussion, thinking and theorizing that comes with open, ambiguous stories, I love the fact that Kill List gives you so much to discuss with numerous clues that could be read multiple ways.
The film’s genre could also be read in multiple ways. If you pigeon holed it and advertised it as purely a horror movie, mainstream horror fans may not get it until the last twenty minutes. You couldn’t market it as a hitman movie, its a film about men who happen to be hitmen, it is hardly the films core. Then again aside from the first twenty odd minutes, it is not a family drama. Kill List meshes genres but never feels like it is doing so, it cannot be classified to one genre and instead stands as its own unique hybrid.
If you are not a fan of horror films however, don’t enjoy stories which leave plenty of room for you to think about and discuss and like to know where a movie is going, saying and why, then avoid Kill List like the plague. If however you enjoyed early day Lost, the bonkers elements of Black Swan and the strangeness and unease of such horror classics like The Wicker Man and The Shining then this film is certainly for you. I have watched the film three times in three days; once with director’s commentary and I am still trying to wrap my head around exactly what I think happened in it and exactly what I think about it.
I couldn’t recommend Kill List to anybody feeling sure that they would like it, I would be sure however that whether they liked it or not, they won’t have had a viewing experience quite like it, at least not in 2011. Overall Kill List is the strangest, scariest, most shocking, most unpredictable and most disturbing film of 2011. Ben Wheatley tremendously directs it and the cast bring a superb realism to the piece. For a film to actually make my jaw drop and to make me revisit it three times in such a short space of time when it is so tough and uncompromising means that whatever Kill List is, it is something pretty special in its own weird and wacky way. I could write an article about twice as long as this review analyzing the plot and what happened and it is that element of the film, along with its shocking ending which ensures that this is one of 2011’s more memorable films. Ultimately it provides the punch in the gut, visceral experience I had been waiting all year for.
Summary:
Shocking, brutal, unpredictable, heavily ambiguous, incredibly atmospheric, wickedly realistic and uncompromisingly strange...Kill List is one of the most unique and memorable viewing experiences of 2011.
Rating: 9/10 (This rating is heavily influenced by the experience of watching the film and the impact it has left on me currently, this is a reserved yet deserved 9...if you think that doesn't make any sense, watch Kill List)
By Movie Parliament Prime Minister,
Michael Dalton
Disagree with this review? Want to discuss the ending? Give us your thoughts in the Your Say section
Rating: 9/10 (This rating is heavily influenced by the experience of watching the film and the impact it has left on me currently, this is a reserved yet deserved 9...if you think that doesn't make any sense, watch Kill List)
By Movie Parliament Prime Minister,
Michael Dalton
Disagree with this review? Want to discuss the ending? Give us your thoughts in the Your Say section
