They Will Kill You review – satanic beat-’em-up offers gore, bad jokes and deja vu

2026-03-26 - 10:10

A housekeeping role turns into a fight for survival in a derivative cocktail of action, comedy and horror that doesn’t go down all that well Come find your new home at the Virgil, one of New York’s oldest and most exclusive and certainly most satanic co-op residences. Never mind the clerestory window embossed with an inverted pentagram that glows red day and night. (You can’t see it from street level anyhow, which is by design.) You’ll be too busy enjoying such fabulous amenities as a full live-in maid staff with peculiarly high turnover, an entire floor dedicated to an unending all-hours orgy, and for those willing to pledge their dark fealty to the head of the building’s board, eternal life. The Virgil: if you lived here, you’d be in hell by now. For the Virgil’s newly hired help, Asia (Zazie Beetz), the job comes with room and board and a whole lot of strings attached, which quickly tighten around her throat. Even though she misses the bathroom-mirror warning that gives Kirill Sokolov’s first English-language feature its title, the unrelenting They Will Kill You wastes no time in establishing its stakes: Asia is here less to make beds and more to serve as a human sacrifice to their unholy anti-God. What the Virgil’s wealth-curdled lifers don’t know is they’ve trifled with the wrong proletarian. In isolating the thesis of 1943’s The Seventh Victim, the first film to correctly link Manhattan real estate holders with the devil, its producer Val Lewton famously posited that “death is good”; Sokolov’s rambunctious, only-sometimes-winningly sophomoric beat-‘em-up amends this axiom to “death is also epically effin’ bad-ass”. Continue reading...