They Will Kill You opens with a happy family gathered around a dining table. Two young sisters stand out in the dark and the pouring rain, looking in at this alluring shop display. They are excluded from its ideal, not just by the intervening window, but because their own notion of a home life has been cruelly broken by the death of their mother and the horrific abuses of their father.
Yet this model of family which they now envy comprises lifeless, plastic mannequins – a grotesque parody of domestic contentment. They are notably all white where the sisters themselves are not. Nonetheless, the quest for family stability will propel the film’s action.
The runaway girls are separated, but ten years later, fresh out of jail, Asia (Zazie Beetz) is looking for her lost little sister Maria (Myha’la), and the trail has led her to the Virgil, a luxurious Manhattan apartment building whose newly hired maids often mysteriously disappear. Greeted by the building’s superintendent Lilith (Patricia Woodhouse) and her husband Ray (Paterson Joseph), Asia will not notice the warning “THEY WILL KILL YOU” written on her bathroom mirror. Yet Asia is both resourceful and equipped, and as she comes under vicious attack from the building’s own rather unusual resident ‘family’ and struggles to work out what is going on, she must kill and kill again to survive this long dark night of the soul. There will be dismemberment.
They Will Kill You will inevitably be compared to Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s horror comedy Ready or Not, whose proletarian protagonist similarly becomes the sport of a superrich Satan-worshipping family, or indeed its sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, where two sisters’ damaged relationship similarly comes to the fore. Yet far from merely ripping off these other films, Russian director Kirill Sokolov, co-writing with Alex Litvak, has also very much brought his own personal stamp to his first English-language film. For here, beginning with a vengeful attack on a bad dad, and then confining a wild mix of genres within an old apartment building, Sokolov is reviving motifs – as well as the gravity-defyingly kinetic action – from his 2018 debut feature Why Don’t You Just Die!, while his focus on a hyperviolent quest to reintegrate a shattered family evokes his follow-up No Looking Back. There is also, squeezed into this building’s corridors and crawlspaces, a smattering of The Evil Dead films (especially Lee Cronin’s most recent, tenement-set reboot) and of Gareth Evans’ apartment actioner The Raid.
In showing a working-class Black girl confront a classist, racist establishment, this is also of course a political film, offering an allegorical display of both the claustrophobic power structures in which we live and strive, and the possibility of smashing it to build something better. It is a satisfying cartoon fantasy of sisterhood and solidarity, while the real-world American (states)woman of colour who best represents Asia’s resistance is referenced in the initials on a number plate seen at the film’s end.
