Suburban thriller meets The Wicker Man in Ben Wheatley's cleverly unsettling British horror movie
A year ago last month, Down Terrace, the first film for the cinema by the British director of TV series and commercials, Ben Wheatley, was given a limited distribution. Made on the thinnest of shoestrings for an alleged £6,000 (the same sum that in 1998 was said to be the notional budget of Christopher Nolan's Following), it was a highly entertaining black comedy largely set in the cosy suburban house of a Brighton gangster, his devoted wife and surly, grown-up son who has recently been acquitted of an unnamed crime.
If you are one of those people whose lips start to shape an explosively sibilant form of the word "spoiler" whenever you start reading a film column, I suggest you put this page aside until you've seen Kill List, though, interesting as it is, I wouldn't necessarily urge anyone to stop whatever they're doing and rush to see Wheatley's movie.
Like Down Terrace, Kill List is an edgy, mysterious thriller that begins in one generic mode and jumps, or modulates, into another. The latest, rather disappointing deployment of this form is Cowboys & Aliens, which starts out as a western before being transformed into a horror picture. Earlier ones include Michael Mann's The Keep, a second world war movie that becomes a horror flick when an SS unit encounters evil forces from the distant past in a remote Romanian castle; and John McTiernan's Predator, where a punitive US expedition in a Latin American jungle is turned into a fight for survival when Arnold Schwarzenegger's special forces platoon is stalked by an extraterrestrial monster. But once horror has been embraced there is no turning back.
Kill List conflates two fashionable movie characters – the troubled veteran of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan adjusting to normal life, and the hitman coolly going about his business in the interstices of society. Jay is an ex-soldier living in a comfortable suburban home with his pretty blonde wife, Shel, and seven-year-old son, Sam, who prefers playing at medieval knights with his dad rather than hearing bedtime stories about the ambushing of armoured cars in Baghdad.
There's a tense atmosphere in the household because Jay (Neil Maskell) hasn't worked for eight months after some terrible incident in Kiev, which turns out to be a botched killing involving Jay and Gal (Michael Smiley), his former comrade-in-arms and subsequent partner-in-crime, as assassins. There follows a brilliantly staged drunken dinner party that ends up with Gal, an amusing, laid-back Irishman, luring the disturbed Jay back into further lucrative contract killing.
They stay at anonymous, ominously silent hotels beside motorways, meet a strange, unnamed client with a suitcase full of banknotes and embark on a series of murders in which the victims appear to welcome their fates as some form of retribution. This only serves to make Jay's behaviour more violent and unprofessional.
Wheatley, his co-writer and editor Amy Jump, his cinematographer Laurie Rose, and his small cast create an unnerving sense of malaise that seems to start in the family and spreads out into the desolate, slimly populated world around them. There are odd, creepy hints of other forces at work. The woman accompanying Gal to the initial dinner party (her job apparently involves sacking people in the current recession) takes down a bathroom mirror and inscribes on the back a diabolic or necromantic symbol as if putting a curse on the house. Part of a dead rabbit is found on the lawn, which Jay cooks and eats with relish like a form of roadkill, though he's less happy when a dead cat is left hanging in the porch.
The duo's client is played by that commanding, somewhat sinister actor Struan Rodger, a familiar TV face but best known for the role in Chariots of Fire as Eric Liddell's closest friend, the deeply religious Sandy; he suddenly insists on the contract being signed in blood and cuts a deep, suppurating wound into Jay's hand. A wraith-like woman in white waves at night from the wasteland across from Jay's hotel.
Gradually, we are being drawn into a different genre from the one we embarked on, and quite suddenly we are in a horror movie where the supernatural challenges the realistic and the moral and political stakes are altered. The films that immediately come to my mind are a British film that everyone knows, The Wicker Man, and a less familiar American picture I greatly admire, Jack Starrett's Race With the Devil, in which Peter Fonda and Warren Oates have satanic encounters in rural Texas. From the start the dialogue is often obscure and not always easy to catch, and the film gets darker and murkier as it proceeds, with some scenes so obfuscated that it's difficult to follow what is going on. This is no doubt intentional. Mystification and disorientation are his objects, not catharsis, and Wheatley, a moviemaker of great individuality and imagination, ultimately leaves us to make what connections we will.
Philip French The Observer,
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