Kill List (2011)

November 27, 2015 11:06 AM

Nearly a year after a botched job, a hitman takes a new assignment with the promise of a big payoff for three killings. What starts off as an easy task soon unravels, sending the killer into the heart of darkness.

This is a selection of MeFi Horror Club, details of which can be found here.

posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape (8 comments total)

Ebert's review sums up my take on the movie very well:

Does it matter that nothing in the payoff makes sense? Does it need to? Has the movie jumped the rails and thrown itself into the hands of wild invention? It seems that way. But so careful is the setup, so convincing the characters, that we don't quite feel we're being toyed with. Somehow the eventual revelations seem to be in a direction the movie was headed.

[...] The movie may leave you scratching your head way too much when it's over. Yet it proves Ben Wheatley not only knows how to make a movie, but he knows how to make three at the same time. I suppose one of the characteristics of horror is that it wears shifting faces.

There's probably more I could say here but I'll see if anyone else wants to weigh in first. IN THE MEANTIME: if you're interested in making the next pick, let me know... I'll give it a bit before I start pinging people in memail.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 11:10 AM on November 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Dear gawd, that ending. Hours, even days after I saw it, I was still occasionally experiencing brief shudders and chills.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:46 PM on November 27, 2015

I liked this movie a lot! It's really good at keeping its own secret aside from one hint (that's pretty hard to glean anything useful from), early on.
posted by destructive cactus at 5:03 PM on November 27, 2015

>aside from one hint

Fiona's weirdness at the dinner party? I think that was the first overt hint that there's something else happening here. And there was the backyard fight with toy swords, which seems innocent at the time but takes on a whole new meaning by the end.

One thing I liked about this is how matter-of-fact some of the weird things are, especially early on. We cut from a domestic scene to follow Fiona into the loo where she carves an arcane symbol into the back of a mirror and stashes some bloody tissues in her blouse. You know, like you do. Perfectly normal. The incidental music doesn't even change, it just fades gradually through the scene and ominous overtones slowly fade in. Makes for a nice change of pace from the OMG violin sirens that go off whenever anything creepy or unusual happens in your garden-variety horror movie. It's refreshing to have a director that assumes you're paying attention and doesn't feel compelled to lead you by the nose (or ears).
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 6:15 PM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Added one more tag, because hopefully I'm not the only one who thought this guy looked like a creepy Joe Biden.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 3:49 PM on November 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is one of my favourite films from the last few years. Seen it a few times now and it rewards repeat viewings. Even made the effort to buy the DVD because I wanted to here the director's commentary which is very insightful. Like that a lot of dialogue was improvised.

It's a great example of showing current Britain of people just kind of holding on whilst trying to scratch a living while horror bubbles away in the background. A country of housing estates and country estates and dreary mostly empty rundown motels and hotels on miserable midweek nights (yeah I've been there)

And that scene with the Librarian is utterly brutal, one of the best uses of violence in a horror film.

Also check out the director's other work (well may be not Down Terrance, I couldn't get on with that). I can't wait to see what he does with High Rise.

As an aside the very first time I heard of Kill List when I was listening to the Kermode and Mayo radio show on podcast whilst blackberry picking on the edge of a windswept field out in the countryside They played a clip of the encounter with the evangelical Christians before giving the review. No that didn't freak me out in the slightest
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:15 PM on December 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Years later, brought to the film by Wheatley’s later work in A Field in England and elsewhere. Loved it.
posted by mwhybark at 11:03 PM on March 21, 2020

Looking at IMDB I amused to note three episodes of that elsewhere are CBS All-Access’ Strange Angel, a series I am watching with bemusement and surprise.
posted by mwhybark at 11:06 PM on March 21, 2020