Prior to tonight my experience of director Ben Wheatley’s work was limited to his adaptation of JG Ballard’s High Rise and a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, but Kill List had long been on my radar and came highly recommended by many people who’s opinion on these things I trust.
From the off Wheatley drops us into the story all but completely cold leaving us to work what exactly is going on as Jay (Neil Maskell) and his wife, Shel (MyAnna Buring) argue about money in what feels like an exceptionally normal British home, shown in such a way that this initially feels like a classic ‘kitchen sink drama’ brought up to date.
From there we gradually discover that Jay, and his apparent friend Gal (Michael Smiley), are veterans of some kind of military service which has left both psychologically scarred, with Jay seemingly the worse off and it being the cause of the trouble at home.
Wheatley shoots all of this in such a way to make it feel exceptionally claustrophobic and take us into Jay’s PTSD effected mind which keeps things far more on edge than seems right, before a kind of almost Tarantino-esque (if the verbose American were from a downtrodden part of England, anyway) plot emerges with Jay and Gal, who have been working as hitmen, hired to kill a list of people.
From there the film wrong foots us at every turn, never quite going where you might expect as they work through their list and uncover something sinister (though we’re never quite sure what) as it builds to a climax that is reminiscent of some other classic British horror.
In that the film moves, stylistically, from unsettling domestic drama, through crime cinema and then, in the third act, it truly does become a horror movie, but with enough mystery and originality to make it its own – all of which is huge credit to Wheatley and regular co-writer Amy Jump’s skills.
Both Maskell and Smiley put in terrific performances, capturing the mundanity of the world they exist in, even as they go about their less than run of the mill job, which brings to mind something of Get Carter and it’s ilk of British crime cinema but also capturing the sense of imbalance that pervades the whole thing.
It’s this sense of imbalance that is key throughout as, while at first, we think it may be due to Jay’s PTSD, it soon becomes clear that’s only one aspect of it and an intense air of unease sets in and never shifts, even in the films climax we are left unsure quite what the film is saying to us and left to make up our own minds.
While Kill List certainly doesn’t shy away from graphic violence, you’ll likely never look at a hammer in the same way again, it doesn’t revel in it either, again adding to the sense of reality as it creates a new kind of British folk horror the likes of which I’ve not seen since at least Dog Soldiers or possibly even The Wicker Man and sits it alongside The Witch (and others) in something of a modern revitalisation of the style.
Tommy Girard 