When director Ben Wheatley took to the stage at the 2011 Frightfest in London, he promised to return after a screening of his new film Kill List and take questions from the audience. But, he cautioned, there was one question he wouldn’t answer – what it all meant. And it’s a question that still being hotly debated in some quarters even now.
Kill List is at least three films in one. It starts as a study of a relationship in turmoil. Jay (Neil Maskell) is a former soldier living with his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) and young son Sam (Harry Simpson). The family are struggling financially as Jay hasn’t worked for eight months and the introduction of his friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his latest girlfriend Fiona (Emma Fryer) at an uncomfortable dinner party that ends in Jay’s barely contained violence rising to the surface reveals what they do for a living and moves us into crime thriller territory. The men are hired guns, hitmen who coldly eliminate targets without question so long as the pay is right. Jay is still suffering the trauma of a never-explained catastrophe that befell their last job in Kiev but is pulled back into the game, accepting a trio of hits from a strange client who cuts Jay’s hand and insists on signing their contract in blood.
The three hits are strange to say the least – the first, a priest, seems to recognise Jay and thanks him before he’s executed. The second is a librarian of some kind, overseeing a massive collection of vile pornography that we never see but which reduces Jay to tears and eventually drives him to commit extreme acts of torture on the librarian and, to the disquiet of Gal, extend their contract to taking out his camera crew. The third, a member of parliament, ushers in a whole new genre as the film veers into “folk horror” territory. Staking out the MP’s house, Jay and Gal witness a strange pagan cult hanging a woman as a sacrifice. Suddenly their lives are in terrible danger as they attempt to flee the cult and Jay finds himself reluctantly playing a central role in their ceremony, a role that is poignantly foreshadowed in an innocent game that Jay, Shel and Sam play in their garden early in the film and which will push him to the limits and destroy everything he holds dear.
Kill List really shouldn’t work. Tonally, it’s all over the place, skipping with reckless abandon from one genre to another. But somehow it does. Mixing social commentary – Wheatley and his regular co-writer Amy Jump touch on the economic hardships afflicting so many ordinary families in 2010s Britain and the traumatising after effects of returning from a war zone – with brutal violence and finally Wicker Man-style pagan horror, Kill List is certainly never dull. Mystifying, perhaps, but certainly not dull. Wheatley has stated that he hates exposition and in Kill List he deliberately pared back the original draft of the script to leave just enough details for audiences to work (some of) it out for themselves but leaving plenty of space for doubt and uncertainty.
We never find out what happened in Kiev nor, more crucially, what the pagan conspiracy are really up to. We know they’ve been targeting Gal and, particularly, Jay for some time. Gal finds that the librarian has been maintaining a file on the pair, with a special dossier on whatever happened in Kiev, the contents of which we never see but are stinging enough to shake the usually unflappable Gal. During the chaotic dinner party, Fiona excuses herself and carves a strange runic symbol – which we, though never Jay or Gal, come to associate with the conspiracy – in the frame of a bathroom mirror and steals tissues stained with Jay’s blood after he cut himself shaving. They manage to replace Jay’s regular doctor with a strange GP who dispenses largely meaningless advice when he goes to the surgery looking for help with the now infected wound in his hand caused by their mysterious client. And the victims all seem to know Jay from somewhere, calmly thanking him for what he’s doing to them even when he’s dispensing horrific hammer torture upon the eternally grateful librarian.
Apart from the moment when Fiona sneaks off to the bathroom, we never leave the viewpoint of the damaged and increasingly bewildered hitmen. When we reach the dazzling finale, as they flee for their lives through a labyrinth of underground tunnels and Jay’s fate is sealed (the pagans seem to get what they want but we’re still none the wiser as to what that actually is), we’re as in the dark as they are. There’s an eerie sense of being completely out of control throughout Kill List, from Jay’s violent outbursts to the final revelation that he’s been set up all along to fulfil some sort of destiny that he may never get to understand. And there’s the real horror in Kill List – not the gory killings or the creepy masked pagans, shrieking as they pursue their quarry. It’s the notion that our lives are being run, manipulated and shaped by others – that they have been for a while and we may never even have been aware of it.
Kill List won’t please those looking for straightforward narratives with easily understood plots and characters we can root for. It’s more obscure than that. It’s an almost impossible film to categorise and virtually demands repeated viewings to try to unravel what’s going on. We may be just as clueless as to what’s going on as Jay is at the fade out but the journey is an exhilarating one and its refusal to explain everything and offer audience pat answers on a plate is refreshing and to be cherished. There’s nothing simple or straightforward about Kill List and if Wheatley does know what it’s all about, he’s still not telling…
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