Film review: Kill List
Directed by: BEN WHEATLEY
Starring: NEIL MASKELL, MYANNA BURING, MICHAEL SMILEY
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WHEN it received its Scottish premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2010, Ben Wheatley’s micro-budget debut film Down Terrace felt like something special. Riffing on the British gangster film, it showcased a film-maker who could not only exploit limited means to tell a gripping story, but one who had enough command of his storytelling abilities to gradually take you into unexpected territory without jarring you out of the film.
More than a year on, Wheatley’s second feature doesn’t just build on the promise of that debut, it thoroughly establishes him as a genuine and bold new voice on the filmmaking scene, someone who serves as a welcome reminder of what can be achieved when film-makers not only have the desire to take risks, but have the confidence to follow through on them and the skills to pull them off. Kill List won’t be everyone’s idea of a great film (it’s far too violent and disturbing for that), but it is great cinema: edgy, unpredictable, meticulously performed, skilfully written, rich in detail and texture, and barking mad.
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Hide AdBefore it reaches that last stage, though, it starts off small and intimate, as ex-soldier Jay (Neil Maskell) and his Swedish-born wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) launch into a blazing row about having no money. As the argument progresses (he accuses her of spending too much on scatter cushions, she scorns his myriad excuses for not working) – they seem like any regular middle-class couple with a young son, suddenly living beyond their means in recession-hit Britain. And yet the details of their marital woes, while vague enough to be unremarkable, don’t quite sit right. The money they’re screaming about is the cash stash from Jay’s last job, and they don’t keep it in the bank, they keep it in a safe in their house.
Things become more strained during a dinner party with Jay’s friend and sometime colleague Gal (Michael Smiley) and Gal’s new girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer). Questions about what Jay and Gal do for work are couched in innocuous sounding business speak and, as it becomes clear Gal wants Jay to come out of his self-imposed period of unemployment, the simmering tensions between Jay and Shel erupt into another blazing row, this time triggered by the etiquette of carving a rack of lamb and whether or not it’s the done thing to serve gravy in a Pyrex measuring jug.
It’s excruciating stuff to watch, partly because of how on-the-nose it is about the way married couples can rile each other with precision accuracy, partly because Wheatley uses the seeming banality of his characters’ home lives to accentuate the uneasiness we’re supposed to feel about what Jay and Gal really do for a living. That job – and Jay’s need to earn from it – is what starts lifting the film out of the realm of kitchen-sink drama and into the realm of genre fare, though what genre specifically is kept pleasingly ambiguous. The shadowy figure to whom Jay and Gal report for duty is so measured and calm he could simply be one of those wizened gangsters who has all the angles covered so doesn’t need to talk too much, or he could be something way more sinister. The people they frequently encounter on the job also hint at this uncertainty thanks to the way they end up being oddly grateful to see them even though horrible things are about to happen to them.
And Jay and Gal keep things off-kilter as well, as they kill time between completing each stage of their new assignment by gabbing matter-of-factly about their work as if it’s the most routine, everyday job in the world. Indeed in some respects they resemble Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta’s hitman team in Pulp Fiction – if those characters had been raised on a steady diet of British soaps, Get Carter and Mike Leigh movies.
Mercifully, Wheately doesn’t plunder those reference points stylistically. Kill List is much more fluid than most low-budget social-realist-influenced British flicks. Indeed the camerawork and editing choices owe more to the elliptical elegance of Steven Soderbergh’s lower-key films, something that allows Wheatley to convincingly hint at the possibility of bigger forces being at play than either of the protagonists realises. That’s important because as Kill List takes an increasingly strange and deranged turn in the final act it would be easy to dismiss it as some shark-jumping shockfest, had enough seeds not been carefully sown throughout to justify the direction it takes.
Perhaps inevitably that finale, and its descent into full-blown horror, will be the source of much post-movie discussion. Yet it’s the film as a whole that makes Kill List – and Wheatley – worth talking about.