Kill List has something of an identity crisis. It begins almost as a kitchen sink drama, as fractious but loving couple Jay (Neil Maskell) and Shell (MyAnna Buring) have Jay’s old army buddy Gal (Michael Smiley) and his new girlfriend (Emma Fryer) to dinner. The film then moves on, keeping the same realistic vibe, and reveals that Jay and Gal are contract killers, and that, after some time out after a bad job in Kiev, they now have a new ‘Kill List’ to accomplish. The film again mutates in its third act, veering off in a direction which is both signposted and utterly unexpected, and it’s this that makes Kill List both quite unique and very difficult to come to a definitive opinion on.
For its first seventy minutes, Kill List is flat out brilliant; one of the best films of the year in fact. Director Ben Wheatley has a very defined style here; his setups are almost documentary like at first, observing his characters from a distance, but then the scenes become more constructed, cutting in for close ups, removing sound or even using the occasional snippet of slow motion for emphasis. For me though it is the editing, by Robin Hill, who also cut Wheatley’s Down Terrace, that gives the film much of its impact. The starkness of Wheatley and cinematographer Laurie Rose’s images is given added impact by the terse, abrupt, cutting. Kill List unfolds in a series of brief moments, we seem to join almost everything in the middle, and leave just before it finishes. This is perhaps best expressed in the multiple times that we see Jay and Gal fight, then, without resolving that moment, simply cut to them laughing together (there is also, I think, a great degree of truth about friendship in a cut like that). This also gives the film’s violence, which is brutal when it comes, an added impact. We see quite a bit of brutality, but it is all so sharply edited – giving the moments we don’t see, as when Gal sits upstairs and hears Jay torturing a victim downstairs, real punch – that audiences will likely go away thinking they’ve seen more violence than they have.
This taut realism also extends to the performances. For the first half hour, despite hints that it might not be entirely legal, we don’t know what Jay does for a living, and the film’s focus is squarely on his family life with his wife and their seven year old son Sam (Harry Simpson). For me this whole section is the key to the film; you buy into this family life. It’s not all happy families, as Jay and Shell argue frequently, but there is also a real connection between these people, and we feel it when we see them laugh together and play with their kid together, and give each other a hard time (a scene featuring a rabbit is priceless). Despite everything you later find out, you do like them, and you do buy into Jay’s love for his family, and similarly his friendship with Gal, which is close in that way that tough guys are close. All of this means that not only can you go along with these people on their journey, but you can get involved with the growing tension as the film goes on. This is all down to the total conviction and reality that Neil Maskell, Michael Smiley and MyAnna Buring bring to the table.
Ben Wheatley generates that tension expertly, be it with the film’s soundtrack; in many places little more than a low, intense, foreboding rumble or with the editing, which often uses a few frames of black between shots, almost as though the film is taking a breath. That said, neither Wheatley nor the cast forget that the mood has to, at times, be lightened and Kill List is actually surprisingly funny. There are no jokes in the film, what comedy there is arises from the characters. In the film’s funniest scene Jay gets up and snatches a guitar away from the leader of a religious group who are disrupting his supper. It’s a fine balance of tones, and Wheatley walks the line beautifully, never letting the moments of levity undermine the tension of the rest of the film.
Throughout the film there is the feeling that we don’t know the whole story, that something else lurks under this assignment, and that’s the sharp left turn the film takes in its last half hour. In some ways it’s obvious almost from the get go, but you just never quite expect the film to go there. Go there it does, and that’s perhaps the problem, because while the first two acts are markedly different from one another, they do feel like the same film. The last half hour really doesn’t. While I’m not someone who wants to be spoonfed every detail of what’s happening and why in a story, the last half hour of Kill List is just full of holes. I can’t talk about the details, but it never made sense to me who we were seeing, and why they were doing, in such an elaborate fashion, what they were doing. On it’s own terms, this section of the film remains striking (if rather more derivative) cinema, but as the ending of this film… it just doesn’t fit. And yet, the reaction it produces is profound; a roomful of critics is a jaded audience, but those I saw it with were visibly dumbstruck by the film’s brutal, abrupt wrap up. What’s going on? What does it mean? That may take several viewings to sort out, but Kill List is interesting enough to warrant that sort of investigation. It doesn’t entirely come together on a first watch, but this is still one of the year’s essential British films.
Review courtesy of Sam Inglis
