Kill List

2011

Director Ben Wheatley

A man walks down the street. He’s confused, disorientated; eyes wide, hands on his head. His breath is laboured. It is as though he has no idea where he is going or is unable to believe what he has just witnessed. But this isn’t Kill List. This is what this reviewer resembled following Ben Wheatley’s latest genre-molesting flick.

Jay and Gal are two unemployed soldiers with dark pasts, making some extra cash by performing a few contract killings for some rather unsavoury business types. Everything becomes far less simple when events lurch towards the occult and Jay’s fragile sanity begins to unravel.

Where to start with Kill List? This is only director Ben Wheatley’s second feature following the 2009 crime saga Down Terrace, but you would never know. It is an absolute joy to see an infantine filmmaker playing with genre and narrative as Wheatley does here. The narrative begins like a Mike Leigh kitchen-sink social drama, with acting of pitch-perfect improvised naturalism between Neil Maskell’s Jay and MyAnna Buring as his wife Shel. We then take a psychological and tonal lurch towards the masculine, as Jay and his old army chum, Michael Smiley’s Gal, go about their bloody work. It would be unfair to use the term ‘buddy’, but the relationship between these two characters is about as engrossing as anything cinema has had to offer recently.

But it is the final act of Kill List, which will leave you scratching your head raw and bloody.

The nightmarish whisperings of unsettling British horror classics such as Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man are heard throughout the film in small doses via, for example, the unsettling, Third Ear Band-like score created by Jim Williams. But come the final act the whisperings stop, and the shouting begins. This descent from social-realism into horror is masterfully handled, avoiding the ridiculous, but maintaining enough ambiguity to regain that vital, visceral sensation of unease.

It is hard to call Kill List original due to the amount of cinema it conjures throughout its 92 minute running time, but these are merely incoherent flashes. As an overall piece, Ben Wheatley has created something for which it truly is hard to compare. Whether or not this is a positive or a negative ultimately is obviously debateable, but this reviewer almost walked into a lamppost after experiencing Kill List, and there’s nothing bad about that.

**** ¼ / *****