TAKE a claustrophobic kitchen-sink drama, throw in some brooding menace, add a hefty explosion of violence and top it all off with a faintly ridiculous yet haunting ending, and you have an idea of what to expect from Kill List, the genre-bending new thriller from British director Ben Wheatley which opens in very limited release this weekend in Los Angeles and New York.
This unsettling piece of work is likely to divide audiences depending on opinions of graphic violence and bleak, downbeat endings. Kill List has earned all sorts of critical hosannas in the UK, with Time Out hailing sophomore director Wheatley as ‘the most idiosyncratic and exciting filmmaker the UK has produced since Shane Meadows’.
The movie opens with a blazing row between Jay (Neil Maskell) and his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring), doing their best to make ends meet amid fractured domicity in a charmless northern English suburb. After a year of unemployment Jay (in classic British fashion) alternates between silent resentment and explosive rage, mainly over his lack of money and work. Tight close-ups and improvised dialog give the film the claustrophic feel of a kitchen-sink drama, before things open up up a little with the arrival of Jay’s business partner Gal (Michael Smiley), who comes over for dinner with the mysterious Fiona (Emma Fryer) and pressures Jay into taking a new assignment. At which point we learn, in the most matter-of-fact fashion, that Jay and Gal are a team of hitmen.
Yet before the men begin their job, Gal and Fiona play their part in an excruciating dinner party that lays bare the waver-thin veneer of Jay and Shel’s domestic surburban pretensions. With poisonous, barbed banter that could have come straight out of Mike Leigh, the evening quickly goes pear-shaped and it’s no suprise when forced civility gives way to profanity and tears before bedtime. It’s one of the film’s most powerful scenes and presages just what horror is yet to come.
After inking a deal (in blood, no less) with a mysterious client, the pair check in to a series of featureless chain hotels with soul-sappingly dull interiors. They could easily be the salesmen of business novelties that they claim to be. But the banality of their chosen profession soon disappears when the wet work begins. When things begin to unravel, they do so quickly and Jay’s astonishing capacity for violence is on gory, unflinching display as he opens one door after another that would have better remained shut.
Wheatley does a very creditable job in building an unsettling, claustrophobic tone which soon turns into a sense of impending, inescapable doom. The climax – which owes more than a small debt to the best-forgotten Edward Woodward chiller The Wicker Man – is less satisfying than what has gone before and for some may be hard to watch.
Despite its shortcomings Kill List is a brooding and haunting work that stays with the viewer long after the final credits. For me the best part of the piece was the friendship between Jay and Gal. Smiley in particular is excellent as the deadpan Irishman with a talent both for killing and darkest of black humor. Like the fractured camraderie in the Peckinpah classic The Wild Bunch, it is the cheerfully macho bond between the men that drives the film’s narrative flow, and in the end, you’re really quite sorry to see the back of them. Even if you know they have to go.
Kill List, directed by Ben Wheatley. Written by Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump. 95 minutes.
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