Kill List (2011) [Blu-ray]
Crime | Horror | Thriller

Eight months after a disastrous hit job in Kiev left him physically and mentally scarred, ex-soldier turned contract killer Jay (Neil Maskell) is pressured by his partner Gal (Michael Smiley), into taking a new assignment. But as they descend into the bizarre, disturbing world of the contract, Jay's reality begins to unravel until fear and paranoia send him reeling towards a horrifying point of no return.

From director Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace), Kill List is a mind-blowing psychological horror film that plunges into the heart of human darkness.

User Comment: *** This review may contain spoilers *** BJBatimdb from Cardiff, Wales, 9 September 2011 • The Kill List is totally brilliant - and absolute rubbish. More specifically, the first 75% of the movie is fantastic - sharply written, wonderfully acted, supremely directed, and filled with tension and realism.

And then it all goes wrong.

I'd heard a few reviews of this film before choosing to see it, and it irks me that not one of them revealed that the last quarter of The Kill List is so divorced from the first that it's like watching a different film altogether. It reminded me of Charlie Kaufman's brilliant Adaptation, where the lead character's idiot brother suddenly steps in to finish the movie. Hilarious in that case - mystifying in this.

Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump start by crafting a stunning examination of the family life of a suburban hit-man that makes The Sopranos look glitzy. Neil Maskell is unnerving as Jay, whose long hiatus from 'work' has led to constant fighting with his wife. Their son witnesses the discord, and the tension and humanity is palpable.

Then Jay is drawn back into doing a well-paid job by his old crony, Gal, and the plot starts to thicken. Gradually the low-key family realism gives way to a realism of a far nastier kind, coupled with sudden moments of real mystery and total surprise.

Wheatley layers the non-action with skill, and really knows how to ratchet up the intrigue. The three main characters are all very good, and even the smaller roles of the son and girlfriend are well played and brilliantly written. You get the feeling you are watching something very special unfold on screen, with no indication of how it will all be resolved. I am a hardened end-guesser and am often right, but with this movie I had NO IDEA where it was going, which is exciting and rare.

However, just as I was preparing for a stunning denouement with all the seemingly-impossible ends tied up, The Kill List turned an ankle and tripped into a ditch full of dung.

O. M. G.

I'm not into writing spoilers - even when the filmmakers have done more spoiling than I ever could in this case. Suffice to say that 'and then he woke up and it was all a dream' would have been a more credible ending, and would at least have made sense of SOME of the set up, instead of none of it at all.

If there was ever a progression of narrative here, it is lying somewhere on a cutting room floor, crying its eyes out at the wasted opportunity.

When the credits came up, there was a stunned silence in the packed cinema and someone turned to his mate and said:'That's the last time YOU choose the effing film'. Judging by the snorts of sympathetic laughter it caused, I'd say it was the best review I'd heard of The Kill List.

I've never been so disappointed by a film that promised so much.

Summary: The best of films, the worst of films.

User Comment: thesubstream from Canada, 19 September 2011 • Lodging itself eventually in the creepy-people-doing-creepy-things tradition of religious/occult horror films like The Wicker Man and Rosemary's Baby, director Ben Wheatley's hit-man horror flick Kill List comes on, initially, like a bad-boy bit of British Social realism.

It's rough around the edges, shaggy and idiosyncratically edited, with dialogue so unpolished and authentic-seeming that it's occasionally hard to decipher. It's filled with a handful of legitimately great performances by actors allowed to work improvisationally, seemingly, lending the first half of the film an incredibly charming unpredictability, a low-key volatility that had me bouncing back and forth between moments of disturbing darkness and happy familial pleasantries. Then it gets really crazy.

Jay and Gal are ex-army, estranged friends and partners in crime. Eight months after a disastrous (and mysterious) gig in Kiev, Jay's home life is disintegrating, and after a raucous dinner party with his ex-partner and his creepy new girlfriend he agrees to get back in the saddle and take a job. They're given a list - three targets - and soon they're settling back into a charmingly macabre groove, carousing "salesmen" on the road from town to town and target to target. But after an inadvertent discovery during a routine bit of hit-man work derails their plans, the pair realize they may be part of something much bigger - and much darker - than a back-room murder-for-hire.

Kill List a stunning piece of very smart genre filmmaking. Wheatley not-so-gently inserts chunks of spooky, disturbing horror into what's already a charmingly dark kitchen sink drama. It's this transition - that either a social realist framework can be twisted into a framework supporting high horror or that a horror film can work filled with improvisational dialogue and broody bits of working-class British anxiety - that makes the film such an immense, jarring pleasure.

Will it work for horror fans used to slick, post-'80s supernatural spookery? Will Ken Loach fans do with a little blood and forest horror? Who knows. For fans of both, it's a stunning - literally - hybrid, something completely unexpected, a real discovery. Kill List is a brilliant idea, brilliantly well executed.

Summary: Our favourite movie of Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness Series.

[CSW] -1.4- Unfortunately by the middle of the first killing I correctly guessed the true plot line. That unfortunate guess took almost all of the suspense and drama out of the movie for me. So even the supernatural part was no surprise to me and the twist at the very end wasn't totally unexpected. I wish I hadn't suspected what was truly happening because then I would've been able to rate this film a lot higher than what I give it. So in retrospect I can't really recommend this movie to anyone who could possibly guess the real plot line. I wish the film and been a little more obtuse which could have added more to my enjoyment of it.
[V5.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.

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