Review of Kill List (2011) by Cosimo M — 02 Sep 2011

There's an undeniable boldness in the pursuit - a welcome willingness to take chances, to proceed in unusual directions even within the same sixty seconds of screen time, risking the sympathies (even the wrath) of the audience who've happily gone along with the ride up to this point: whatever "Kill List"'s strengths or weaknesses, it's unmistakably the work of a talent insistent on forging his own path, and the very opposite of committee filmmaking.

The strengths are immediately apparent: to succeed in taking us with him, Wheatley needed everyone to be pulling together, and the film is, from first frame to last, an ensemble piece, even as its narrative condemns its characters to isolation.

Maskell, who's slimmed down and grown up since his podgy comic-relief turn in "The Football Factory", does a nice line in understated blokishness that gives way to blunt, semi-exhausted explosions of rage; against him, Wheatley locates notes of brittle privilege and tenacity in Buring that other lowish-budget productions ("The Descent", "Lesbian Vampire Killers", "City Rats", which is something of a descent in itself) have thus far missed.

Most encouraging of all is that this filmmaker should, this early in his career, have stumbled upon a performer as talismanic as Smiley, an actor with a real knack for evoking shabby malevolence, even as he earns the kind of laughs "Kill List" badly needs just to keep us watching.

The weaknesses emerge only belatedly, and by then you may be too hooked to care: having exhausted all other generic options, the film's third act strays into an area that will be familiar to scholars of British genre cinema (Buring's Swedishness may be the key), with traces of "The Last Exorcism" and the point-and-shoot aesthetics of such console games as "Doom" - in short, it gets explicable, when so much of its opening hour is oneiric and inexplicable, and all the more unsettling for that.

Less a sleek thrill ride than a darkly bucking bronco, "Kill List" risks throwing you off at almost every point: it's not an easy film to synopsise, or watch, or - one suspects - for its director to have to follow up.

But it is, for the most part, suspenseful and genuinely eerie: further evidence of what a highly accomplished filmmaker Wheatley is developing into.