Kill List

Ben Wheatley’s Kill List is a 2011 horror film, hyped to be a resurrector and reanimator of  British Cinema which apparently has been the victim of a ‘chronic medical condition’.  However, I find this view unsatisfactory. Although British Cinema has always struggled to reach the first ranks of world cinema, it’s never stagnated or deteriorated; the previous decade saw the likes of Moon, Layer Cake, 28 Days Later, The Wind that Shakes the Barley and the list could go on. So why it has fallen on Ben Wheatley’s humble, and comparatively obscure, sophomore effort to project the entire nation’s film industry to global stardom, baffles me.   

One can only give the bare essentials of the plot without spoiling the many twists and turns the narrative provides. The film starts with a violent argument between a husband and wife, over money and work. Shel (MyAnna Buring) has had enough of her lazy husband, who’s been without work for eight months, and who shows no sign of securing another job. Jay (Neil Maskell), an Iraq war veteran, blames his bad back, which only an expensive jacuzzi can cure. Shel shouts back “It’s all in your head”.

              

The (verbal) violence with which the film starts will escalate, and spill over as the narrative progresses, reaching dire depths of hyperbolic ghastliness, as bodies are hacked to pieces and bludgeoned to pulp. In a similar vein, the plot itself and the genres the film encapsulates, are similarly chopped apart, mangled, and reincorporated to create a movie that is at once eerily familiar and grotesquely alien. Allusions to previous films abound, and most of them British. The brilliantly tense domestic scenes of the first act recall the kitchen sink dramas of the 50s and 60s. The second act, which follows the two leads carrying out contracted killings, reeks of Taranatino and Guy Ritchie, and the ever-so-slightly-ridiculous third act seems only explicable as a post-modern supplication to one British horror classic in particular, but to name which one would spoil the surprise.

Because of its pastiche nature, there is a lot here that will leave most viewers scratching their heads. The plot does go to some very unexpected places and many characters do things that are inexplicable. I have only seen the film once, and perhaps re-watching it might give some answers, but I highly doubt it. The main theme here is violence, and, as Kill List shows,  violence takes many forms. It operates when a wife screams at her lay about husband, when a soldier fights a war, when Catholics and Protestants battle in Ireland, when two best friends solve their disagreements with a childish wrestle, when a cat kills a rabbit and leaves the entrails as an offering to its keepers, or when man repeatedly smashes another man’s skull in with a hammer.  Violence is never ordered, and never meditated, it gets out of control, and so does Kill List. And this makes for a riveting and chilling film, which, whilst not able to bear the entire burden of British Cinema on its back, is still able to breathe some new life into its Horror genres, and it does this in a wonderfully British way.