Kill List is a messy movie, literally and figuratively. There's a lot going on within its lean 95 minutes, and more than a few viewers did not hesitate to call foul. Roger Ebert—a brilliant critic whose prose style nonetheless usually leaves something to be desired—struck the bullseye in his review, delivering an appropriately jumbled verdict: "It's baffling and goofy, blood-soaked and not boring. That it's well-made adds to the confusion; it feels like a better film than it turns out to be."
But what's really maddening is the fact that, well, it is a better film than it turns out to be. Part kitchen-sink crime story, part jagged suburban nightmare, and part Wicker Man homage, Kill List is ambitious, brutal, and mesmerizing—but it's also murky, asymmetrical, and hard to like. It's reminiscent of the work of Michael Haneke (Funny Games) and Gaspar Noé (Irreversible) in that it combines precise, expert craftsmanship with decisions that seem designed to purposefully alienate the viewer. It's the kind of movie you can't stop rolling around in your head after watching it—partly because you're probably trying to settle on whether you actually liked it or not.
It's definitely a horror movie, but in a very particular way. There's nothing supernatural or otherworldly on tap here, only the sordid ugliness of man. The film revolves around Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley), a pair of soldiers-turned-contract killers who go to work for a mysterious, sinister "Client." Despite their grim vocation, Jay and Gal are wisely depicted as ordinary, likable men who happen to kill people for a living. Gal is the archetypal charming Irish rogue, while Jay is a high-strung but loving family man whose tumultuous relationship with his wife (MyAnna Buring) is one of the film's focal points; the film opens with a domestic screaming match over their vanishing bank account.
A tense dinner party scene early in the film is as absorbing as any of the murders seen later, perfectly capturing the kind of casual cruelties and simmering resentments that mark a marriage balanced on a razor's edge over financial ruin. Before we come to know the central duo as killers, we come to know them as people.
As it happens, Gal is also a Catholic (albeit more culturally than anything) while Jay and his wife are unrepentant atheists (reminder #2 that you're not watching an American movie, after the acccents), and the first target on their list turns out to be a priest. But this fact proves to be little more than a speed bump, as Gal casually notes that they should be thankful that their quarry isn't a little kid; unlike a lot of movies with the familiar "no women, no kids" hitman's code of honor, you get the sense that working class anti-heroes Jay and Gal probably would take a job targeting women and children—but they would do so reluctantly, and they certainly wouldn't be happy about it. There is little moralizing in Kill List, and what we do get is agreeably warped, like when one of our anti-heroes makes the hilariously qualified claim that "I've hardly done any terrible shit."
The relationship between Jay and Gal is the best part of Kill List, and in their rough-edged gallows humor and back-slapping camaraderie we can recognize our own friends, brothers, fathers and sons. But their separation from us is also total, because, after all, they kill people people for a living. And they do so very dispassionately: while plotting how to attack the priest, Jay makes a joke about how they should probably surveil him for a while rather than just shooting him down on the street in a hail of bullets, and his affect is akin to an office worker discussing a broken copier.
And indeed, the violence in Kill List is sudden, drained of glamor, and almost casual. It's also sometimes quite hard to watch, even for a seasoned veteran of horror film gross-outs like myself. There's a scene with a hammer that puts even Drive's to shame in terms of sheer visceral impact; it's in the same category as the stomach-churning opening scene from Frayed, although I don't know if it quite outstrips that one.
You may not be surprised to discover that as the film goes on, things get worse. Maskell's performance proves to be one of the film's greatest assets as Jay becomes increasingly unglued, a simmering cauldron of post-traumatic anger and violence. Again, there are no overt horror histrionics on display, and that's part of what makes the film so strangely successful: Kill List positively seethes with menace, and it does so without falling back on stale cliches. A big contribution comes from Jim Williams' music and Martin Pavey's sound design, filling everyday shots of suburban streets and neatly trimmed lawns with baleful, ominous dissonance.
[Warning: spoilers ahead.]
It all leads up to the ending, which is the point where you decide whether your accounts of the movie to friends will be filled with cursing. All along the way the film has been scattering breadcrumbs suggesting that there's something even more ominous at work beyond casual brutality and murder for hire; you get the sense that "the Client" may have enlisted Jay and Gal in service to some kind of dark pagan lord or tentacled elder god, slouching towards Sheffield to be born.
The film's climax is interesting for how on the nose it is, considering that Kill List is a film that seems to delight in vagueness and questions left unanswered (e.g. what happened to Jay and Gal in Kiev). But it also works, almost in spite of itself; the finale is full of eerie visual details and assaulting sonics that seem like the logical culmination of the whole film's patient, boiling sense of dread.
The biggest problem with the film's last moments is sort of an accident of timing: they are remarkably similar to the ending of A Serbian Film, Srđan Spasojević's controversial 2010 shocker, and both movies seem to share nearly identical story arcs. But these movies are awfully close to each other chronologically for Kill List to be consciously emulating A Serbian Film, which makes me think they arrived at their respective twists of the knife independently.
And if you ask me, Kill List works better than its more notorious counterpart on every level. When I finally got around to seeing A Serbian Film, the latest entry in the "most transgressive film ever made" sweepstakes, I was a little surprised and disappointed at how cartoonish it was—a judgment that seems borne out by Spasojević and writer Aleksandar Radivojević's comments that the film was apparently intended as a parody of political correctness (a message that may or may not be supported by the end product).
As shock cinema's latest enfant terrible, A Serbian Film is certainly disturbing—but it's also so gleefully over-the-top that its final dark revelation seems painfully obvious, and as a result lacks the revolting horror it should properly have. The vibe of Kill List is entirely different: it's The Jesus Lizard to A Serbian Film's Cannibal Corpse ("Hammer Smashed Face" allusion entirely intentional), eschewing rote signifiers of brutality in favor of something rawer and more genuinely disorienting. There's a brilliant moment right after the film's final reveal, when the frame freezes and a grating feedback tone sweeps up to nearly deafening volume—and for a second, I really didn't know what would happen next. Would we cut to the credits? Would Jay's head suddenly explode? Would my TV? Would Satan, laughing, spread his wings?
Some movies are easy to like. It's virtually impossible to honestly hate on something like, say, Shaun of the Dead. But Kill List is not such a movie. It never seems like it cares about winning you over, but it also doesn't seem like it's trying to piss you off; it's never sophomoric or exploitative. It just is—and as such, it's very much in the native British tradition of "kitchen sink" filmmaking. It's messy, difficult, harsh, and overwhelming. But somehow, almost in spite of itself, it's also very good.
