If I told you that “They Will Kill You” plays a lot like if Sam Raimi remade “Kill Bill,” that would likely make you want to see it more than it should. It also feels a lot like if the director of “Drag Me to Hell” had been allowed to make a third feature in the Tarantino/Rodriguez collab “Grindhouse.” Again, despite that accuracy, lower the expectations a tick. It’s a sporadically fun movie with obvious influences, but it also lacks in stakes and personality, getting repetitive long before it ends. Star Zazie Beetz is all-in as a new action warrior, and it contains some inspired extreme gore, but “They Will Kill You” becomes monotonous, and the connective tissue between the set-pieces is too thin to truly warrant comparison to the films that birthed it.
Beetz plays Asia Reaves (a very Tarantino name that’s splashed across the screen in one of the film’s chapter breaks), a woman who answers a help-wanted ad at a mysterious New York hotel called The Virgil. Since the early twentieth century, it has had a reputation: it could be the number of people who have gone missing over the years, the locks on the inside of the front door, or the devil imagery on the front door. It’s clearly a demonic palace, but even Asia has no idea how deep its secrets run or what the truth of its residents is.
The first night that Asia gets there, she’s greeted by the manager of the building, Lilith (Patricia Arquette), who takes her to her room. Before she even gets settled in, Asia is attacked by four people in pig masks, including villains played by Heather Graham and Tom Felton, leaders in the building’s Satanic Cult. If you’re saying, “This sounds a lot like Ready or Not,” you’re not wrong, but there’s a crucial twist here that shifts the temperature into something more truly chaotic than the Samara Weaving franchise. After the film’s best sequence, the first battle between Asia and her four attackers, ends with her enemies in literal pieces, our heroine is stunned to watch them basically reform like lizards with their tails cut off.
Yes, the deal with the devil cut by the residents of the Virgil has made them immortal, which allows director Kirill Sokolov to go gonzo with his gore-filled action because nothing has any lasting consequences. While this makes for a deranged cavalcade of body parts rended from their owners, it drains “They Will Kill You” of its stakes. While things like the Crazy 88 Scene in “Kill Bill” don’t exactly traffic in realism, there’s something numbing about the action in “They Will Kill You,” a sense that it shares as much DNA with video games as filmmaking. It’s also clear that comic books were a strong influence on Sokolov, as some of the framing in his film looks like a panel from a gory graphic novel.
Comic books, video games, Tarantino, Raimi – “They Will Kill You” starts to feel like an unholy hybrid of so many influences that it lacks its own personality. Having said that, the true chaos of it all can be fun for one main reason: its greatest asset isn’t the influences of its makeup/VFX; it’s the fearless Zazie Beetz. Whether she’s beheading someone in her underwear or lighting an axe on fire just to make its impact more memorable, Beetz is a fantastic action hero. And she even does a solid job of carrying the emotional weight of a character with a compelling reason for this journey to Hell: saving her sister, Maria (Myah’la), who she knows lives at the Virgil. Beetz has long been one of the more interesting actresses of her generation, and this flick proves she could carry her own franchise.
One just wishes this were the franchise in question. At a time when so many festival movies are being dumped on streaming services, it makes a little sense that this is one of the SXSW films getting a wide release, courtesy of New Line and Warner Bros. It’s the kind of film that works way better with a cheering audience around it to give depth to a film that feels pretty shallow in terms of things like character, theme, and even plotting. It’s an aggressively righteous yell of a film, one that uses violence and gore to overwhelm a popcorn-chewing audience into cheering for it, largely as they remember the many influences on it that did it so much better. In the end, it’s just not creative or confident enough to kill its many flaws.
This review was filed from the world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. It opens on March 27, 2026.
