Directed by Kirill Sokolov,| Starring Zazie Beetz
There’s a certain category of film that asks you to check your brain at the door and simply revel in the mayhem unfolding onscreen. They Will Kill You lands squarely in that category, and for viewers willing to meet it on those terms, it offers a reliably entertaining hour and a half of supernatural action and gloriously over-the-top gore.
The setup is straightforward enough: Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) infiltrates The Virgil, a century-old Manhattan high-rise with a dark reputation, under the guise of taking a housekeeping job. Her real mission is to retrieve her younger sister Maria (Myha’la), who has been living among the building’s secretive and deeply unpleasant residents. What Asia doesn’t know walking in is that those residents are immortal Satanic cultists, and that the building operates like a series of increasingly dangerous rooms she must fight through to reach her goal.
That video game structure is one of the film’s more clever conceits, and Sokolov makes good use of The Virgil’s architecture. Tight corridors, vertical elevator shafts, and hidden crawlspaces all become arenas for some genuinely inventive action choreography. The early set pieces in particular carry real momentum. When Asia first confronts her masked attackers in her room, the editing is sharp and kinetic, and the sequence announces the film’s willingness to go somewhere unexpected and grotesque.
The gross-out creativity on display here is worth acknowledging. Sokolov and his prosthetics team clearly had a blast engineering their various methods of mayhem, and the immortality gimmick, which lets characters reassemble themselves after being destroyed in spectacularly unpleasant ways, gives the action sequences a looney-tunes logic that is hard to resist. A severed eyeball with its optic nerve still attached becomes a recurring gag that somehow remains charming rather than overstaying its welcome.
Above all of this, Zazie Beetz is the film’s most compelling reason to show up. She is a fully committed, physically impressive action lead who never condescends to the material. Beetz brings a grounded, fierce quality to Asia that makes her genuinely worth rooting for even as the plot around her grows increasingly absurd. Her scenes with Myha’la, while brief and not given quite the space they deserve, hint at a real sibling dynamic with some emotional texture. The film is at its best when it remembers that Asia is fighting for something more personal than survival.
The supporting cast rounds things out well enough. Patricia Arquette brings a dry authority to building manager Lilith, and Paterson Joseph adds a welcome note of warmth to the proceedings. Tom Felton and Heather Graham lean confidently into their roles as blond, sneering antagonists.
They Will Kill You will not be mistaken for a work of deep thematic ambition, and it runs out of fresh ideas before it runs out of runtime. But as a stylish, gleefully violent genre exercise built around a movie star performance from Beetz, it mostly delivers what it promises. If you are the kind of audience member who will cheer for a woman splitting a cultist in two with a flaming axe, this film was made for you.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Screen Rated 
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