Kill List

British writer/​director Ben Wheat­ley defin­i­tive­ly made the jump from com­mer­cials to full-blow fea­tures after the suc­cess of last year’s micro-bud­get, Brighton-set thriller Down Ter­race. Now he’s tak­en anoth­er stel­lar leap for­ward with this sim­ply stun­ning fol­low-up. With an ambi­tious reach that once again con­founds the con­straints of a low bud­get, Wheat­ley has pulled off a horror/​thriller mash up for way less than a mil­lion quid.

The bleak hills of Sheffield pro­vide a suit­ably omi­nous back­drop to this sub­ver­sive vision of sub­ur­ban life, in which we’re intro­duced to a pair of ex-sol­diers-turned-washed-up assas­sins for hire, Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smi­ley). Talk­ing in hushed tones about a botched job in Kiev, they’re now weigh­ing up the pros and cons of accept­ing anoth­er ​‘kill list’ of anony­mous tar­gets from a mys­te­ri­ous employ­er who seals the deal with blood. Like trav­el­ling sales­men reimag­ined as grim reapers, south­ern geezer Jay and sweet-talk­ing Irish­man Gal go about their busi­ness with ruth­less efficiency.

The rapid-fire chat­ter between these two hang­dog hit­men ham­strung by booze and blind loy­al­ty soon segues into sequences of extreme car­nage (“Don’t just mow him down in a hail of bul­lets like some Hack­ney crack­head!”). But as the corpses pile up, the para­noia kicks in for Jay, who, fear­ing for his fam­i­ly, sud­den­ly grows a con­science. Before long, events have spi­ralled out of con­trol in a flur­ry of crushed skulls and point-blank execution.

What fol­lows is a blis­ter­ing dénoue­ment that’s not for the squea­mish. Deliv­er­ing an intense reveal to rival Russ­ian roulette psy­chodra­ma 13 Tza­meti, Kill List is pre­ci­sion cal­i­brat­ed to put audi­ences through an emo­tion­al wringer.

Jay’s jour­ney from alco­holic ex-ser­vice­man suf­fer­ing from post-trau­mat­ic stress to rag­ing killer drags him and his best pal deep­er into a world over­shad­owed by the occult. Not for Wheat­ley the emp­ty swag­ger of a Hol­ly­wood carve-’em-up. Like Kore­an thriller Old­boy, Kill List takes us to the dark side of a moral waste­land from which there’s no safe return.