Ben Wheatley (2011)

Jay is a former soldier turned contract killer in civilian life.  His latest assignment, in Kiev, was traumatising (quite how isn’t explained) but his Scandinavian wife Shel is fed up of his being out of work – she needs housekeeping money for their young son Sam and some kind of social life.  Jay and Shel manage with some difficulty, and a lot of angry argument, to invite another couple round for dinner – Jay’s fellow hitman and buddy Gal, and his girlfriend Fiona, who’s more conventionally employed:  she has a job in human resources.  The upshot of this gathering is that Jay climbs back in the saddle:  he and Gal sign up for a job with a creepy businessman type.  The deal, which is sealed by The Client (as he’s referred to in the film’s credits) putting a knife blade into the palm of Jay’s hand and drawing blood, is for Jay and Gal to dispatch a prescribed sequence of victims – a priest, then a librarian, then an MP.  There was a bit of blurb on the poster in Edinburgh’s Cameo Cinema describing Kill List as (something like) ‘The most terrifying hitman movie I’ve ever seen’:  no connoisseur of the genre, I can’t argue with that.  The climax brings to mind The Wicker Man so I guess there’ll be an audience for Ben Wheatley’s picture among supernatural horror film fans too.  But I didn’t get it.  There’s nothing witty in the extreme violence and nothing terrifying either.  There are sequences that are viscerally shocking and Wheatley has put together an unnerving soundtrack – even though the drum rolls before something nasty happens (or seems likely to happen) are predictable rather than ominous.

What wit there is in Kill List resides in the lines:  the screenplay is credited to Wheatley and Amy Jump (his wife), with additional dialogue by the actors.   Much of what I could hear of the exchanges at the dinner party early in the film is pretty sharp.  It’s a reasonably good joke that the HR girl is into Satanism outside office hours – there’s an implication that the two occupations are coherent because they’re concerned with ‘getting rid of extraneous people’, although both groups would no doubt see this is a travesty of their mission statements.  The joke’s not all it might be anyway because it’s revealed early:  a pentacle or similar appears with the opening credits and, when Fiona uses Jay and Shel’s bathroom, she draws the same symbol on the back of the mirror.   It’s also clear from the start – in the way he behaves at home, especially at the dinner party – that Jay can’t control his temper.  It comes as no surprise that he’s no better at keeping his cool in his professional activities.  (It’s the discovery that ‘the librarian’ is the guardian of large quantities of what I assume is child pornography that sparks the assault by Jay which provides the most protracted and intolerable sequence of violence in the film.)  In fact nothing is much of a surprise in Kill List, except for the final, tragically inadvertent killing that Jay carries out – of a hunchbacked member of the horde of Satanists (who turn out to include The Client as well as Fiona from HR).  The hunchback is Shel carrying Sam, and Jay stabs them both to death.  Come to think of it, maybe that’s not a surprise either – once you’ve got the message that Sam is the best thing in his father’s life, and that Jay’s life is going inexorably downwards.

Neil Maskell is physically very convincing as Jay and gives a highly committed performance; Michael Smiley as Gal is good too.  (There are moments when the aggressive horseplay between these two verges on the homoerotic.)   The very pretty MyAnna Buring is Shel, Emma Fryer is Fiona, and Struan Roger (the only actor I recognised) is The Client.  Until latish on, Shel seems remarkably relaxed about Jay’s way of life – no doubt because she used to be in the Swedish army and Kill List isn’t the first recent British film (cf In Our Name) to assert the inevitably brutalising effects of military service, spiced up here with the implication of a perverted sense of honour being served and justice done when paedophile ringleaders and devil worshippers get what’s coming to them.   Most of the small audience in the cinema were youngish men; the two in the same row as me laughed a good bit early on but then quietened down.  Some very fine films contain violence that wipes the smile off an audience’s face and make us think.  Kill List does only the former.

14 September 2011