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One’s tolerance for hyperviolent giggle-fests may vary, but if you only have time for one movie in theaters about a cult of elite satanists hunting down a pair of sisters, you might as well make it director Kirill Sokolov’s cheerfully gonzo “Kill Bill” riff “They Will Kill You,” starring Zazie Beetz.
It’s of course purely coincidental that two films with similar premises — “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” and “They Will Kill You” — are in theaters at the same time, but secret elitist cults with a taste for young women have been on the brain for years now. In Sokolov’s “They Will Kill You,” written with Alex Litvak, that premise is combined with a Tarantino-esque taste for kung fu movies and nonlinear storytelling, as well as a “John Wick”-style quest for vengeance.
That may sound too derivative for some, but Sokolov, known for his outlandish Russian-language action-comedies “Why Don’t You Just Die!” and “No Looking Back,” brings a truly wacky sensibility to his first English-language feature. It’s also a visual feast, with a dynamic camera that is truly its own beast. Cinematographer Isaac Bauman’s eye never stops moving — an independent narrator telling a different story than the one starring our heroine.
Beetz stars as Asia, a young woman who turns up on the stoop of a high-end Manhattan apartment building, the Virgil, answering an ad for a maid job. But both she and the stern house manager, Lily (Patricia Arquette), are hiding something from each other. Asia hasn’t been brought in as a servant but as an offering, a human sacrifice to be hunted by the wealthy residents of the Virgil. Meanwhile, Asia hasn’t gone there to work, but to find and rescue her younger sister, Maria (Myha’la).
The story is fleshed out in flashbacks but all you need to know is that Asia, who honed her combat skills in prison, has one goal that is diametrically opposed to the goal of the bloodthirsty rich folks in cloaks and pig masks, and they’ll have to fight it out until dawn.
“They Will Kill You” is both irreverent and reverential to its references — and cartoonishly violent in increasingly surreal ways — but it also maintains the emotional core at the center, which is Asia’s big-sister protectiveness over Maria, powered by the guilt she feels over not being there for her. It’s a simple but primal character motivation that Beetz sells with a wild-eyed ferocity.
Beetz delivers a terrifically animated physical performance. Her fight training is top-notch, but the way she chaotically scrambles and swings her weapons — from samurai swords to sawed-off shotguns and flaming axes — gives her movement a sense of authentic panic and sheer reflex. She and the rest of the cast, which includes Tom Felton and Heather Graham, engage in a delightful dance in each fight scene, the camera chasing them down and shaking the foundations of the building.
While Sokolov and Litvak’s script is thematically straightforward, it incorporates a few nods to racial and class solidarity throughout that are refreshing to see addressed, even if some of those nuances go unexamined. But Sokolov and Litvak leave these few real-world thematic threads dangling as they have bigger fish to fry — or pigs to roast.
It’s the more bonkers elements that make this movie sing and that grinning, ghoulish sensibility proves to be Sokolov’s auteurist signature. It’s clear that he takes inspiration from some of the best genre films and filmmakers of the 20th century and has filtered them through the ironically postmodern lens of the ’90s bad boy movie nerd directors. But his willingness to get really weird with it — paired with a terrific sense of visual storytelling — makes him one to watch, elevating “They Will Kill You” into something more entertaining than it initially seems.
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