Zazie brings the Beetz in Kirill Sokolov’s satanic slapstick spatterfest confection, in which Dario Argento’s Inferno meets The Raid by way of The Evil Dead.
★★★½
If you’re burned out on slow-burn horror, this goes the other way: a firecracker strip of brutal, kinetic action-horror fights that propels Zazie Beetz from the servants’ quarters to the attic of a vast New York hotel that the Ghostbusters would no doubt call “Satan Central.” Kirill Sokolov’s film is a one-location action-horror with a heart; it gets the blood pumping early, and then never lets up.
Beetz plays Asia Reaves, fresh out of prison, who takes a job as a cleaner in an upscale 1920s New York hotel while searching for her missing sister, Maria. The hotel is called The Virgil, and as Dante fans might anticipate her search will take her to hell and back. She’s pulled deep into the building, and finds that it houses a Satanic cult with members played by a very game Tom Felton, Heather Graham, and Patricia Arquette. When she eventually reunited with her sister Maria is played by Myha’la, saddled with a distractingly bad wig. Meanwhile Paterson Joseph (Peep Show, and a perennial fan choice as a Doctor Who) plays a mysterious wannabe benefactor with an equally mysterious American accent.
Asia’s search for family, and for home, is at the heart of the film. The Satanists are a found family too, of a sort, and if this slapstick spatterfest confection has any kind of moral, it’s this: family is who you fight for.
The set design leans heavily into Argento territory. There are clear echoes of Suspiria and especially Inferno in the look of the building. Hidden passages and vertical shafts shape how the space is used, and the odd-sized rooms keep everything slightly off balance. Nothing quite lines up, which gives the whole place a built-in unease.
Two things hold this movie together: the sense of the building as a character in itself, always full of surprises, and Beetz moving through it into new spaces, into new problems, meeting new people and chopping them in half. The action is propulsive, kinetic and playful, with samurai cinema-style fountains of blood that fly out of neck stumps, arm stumps, ankle stumps, you name it. There’s a lovely Raimi touch too, in a having a living eyeball drag itself through the hotel, a nod perhaps to the possessed hand in Evil Dead 2.
The music is pretty banging, with a track by Ryan Gosling’s band Dead Man’s Bones dropped in at exactly the right moment, but make no mistake, this is a fundamentally goofy movie. As characters kept referring to the Head of the Hotel, I stated to wonder if this was building to the same gag as the Charles Band flick Head of the Family. The answer is… well, this is indeed just that kind of movie.
The highlight is a sequence in a pitch-black hotel restaurant, with Beetz finding her way through a crowd of attackers and taking them on with a flaming axe that serves as both torch and weapon. As she leapt screaming through the air, with a table exploding around her, her face lit up by a shotgun blast, I thought: this is cinema.
They Will Kill You is in US and UK cinemas from Friday
Whitlock&Pope 