They Will Kill You (dir. Kirill Sokolov)

by Jack Martin | Mar 24, 2026

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 94 mins

UK Distributor: Warner Bros

UK Release Date: 27 March 2026

WHO’S IN THEY WILL KILL YOU?

Zazie Beetz, Myha’la, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, Patricia Arquette

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Kirill Sokolov (director, writer), Alex Livtak (writer), David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Dan Kagan, Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti (producers), Carolis Rafael Rivera (composer), Isaac Bauman (cinematographer), Luke Doolan (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A newly-arrived maid (Beetz) fights for survival in a mysterious high-rise…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THEY WILL KILL YOU?

Not even a week after the release of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, we have ourselves yet another gory action-comedy about a young woman fighting a wealthy group of satanists while also protecting her estranged younger sister. And just like that film, They Will Kill You is never better than simply “okay”.

While one has to respect Russian director and co-writer Kirill Sokolov’s English-language debut for pushing certain boundaries, albeit ever so gently, when it comes to over-the-top carnage, the film can’t help but feel somewhat empty. Not only does it lack the wit, charm, grace and smarts of countless other action and horror movies it’s trying to replicate, but it’s a film so loosely sketched that you can barely make out the pencil lines beyond the most basic foundations. That, coupled with a few other major narrative faults, ultimately makes They Will Kill You a disappointingly bland exercise in gory excess dominating over all the things that should make us care. But hey, at least the action’s pretty good.

The film opens on a rainy night in New York where, at the entrance of a fancy high-rise hotel called The Virgil, a young woman named Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) – going under a fake name for reasons that soon become (sort of) clear – shows up to take a vacant housekeeping position. After being welcomed by the hotel’s manager Lily (played by a ridiculously flamboyant Irish accent disguised as Patricia Arquette) and being introduced to some of the wealthy residents, including Heather Graham as beautician Sharon, Asia is left to rest in her quarters. But in the middle of the night, a group of cloaked pig-masked invaders, among them not just Sharon but also Tom Felton’s Kevin, sneak in and attempt to reprimand her, for this hotel is actually the worshipping ground of a satanic cult that makes regular human sacrifices in exchange for some, well, let’s just say useful abilities.

However, or perhaps inevitably in an action-centric movie such as this, they picked the wrong person to sacrifice. Asia surprises her would-be captors with a whole arsenal of weapons that she quickly uses to defeat them, and shortly after she embarks on her true mission: to locate her younger sister Maria (Myha’la), whom she was previously forced to abandon after attempting to kill their abusive father, and save her from becoming more embedded within the monstrous hierarchy of the hotel than she already is. Naturally, Asia will have to go through countless satanists, all spearheaded by Lily, in order to find Maria, though it proves slightly more difficult when she catches wind of their, erm, rather useful abilities.

To a point, you can see what Sokolov is trying to do with this film. It really is nothing more than a loosely connected series of action scenes, but they happen to be very well executed action scenes which are amusingly choreographed and quirkily shot, all while doubling down on the cartoonishly grotesque violence dished out by, and sometimes towards, Beetz’s hardened hero. They Will Kill You clearly fancies itself a hyperviolent ballet, to where I’m genuinely surprised this scored a 15 certificate rather than the full-blown 18 (I guess between this and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, the BBFC is now fine with rich people being slaughtered and blown up for our entertainment), and it commits as much as it can to delivering a blood-soaked spectacle where heads are chopped off, people are shotgun-blasted to the other side of the room, and axes set on fire chop people clean in half.

The problem, however, is that there’s never a reason to care about any of it. Sokolov and co-writer Alex Livtak throw the viewer into the mix so quickly – within ten or so minutes of Beetz arriving at this hotel, she’s already fighting for her life – that little time is spent going into vital details about this location or the apparently many floors where all sorts of craziness is happening (there’s one that’s apparently just an extended orgy, but beyond a pile of naked bodies we barely see any of it). Worse still, there is no character in this film who is given an ounce of personality beyond their most basic motivations, from Beetz’s Asia who largely just fills the stock hero role to Tom Felton’s Kevin, a character who can only be described as “Kevin”. We learn so little about any of these people, what their backstories are, why they’re part of this satanic cult, and how they’ve been able to get away with these sacrifices for so long, especially when devilish imagery is literally carved onto the very exteriors of this building, that you’re left watching a bunch of blanks instead of a fully-loaded artillery.

It’s a film that doesn’t have much of its own personality either, with even the action wearing its influences – primarily Kill Bill, The Raid and Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy – firmly on its blood-stained sleeves, to where after a short while you’re more eager to rewatch any of those films instead because they at least had a more interesting set of characters and plot. That is unfortunate, because there are some fine bits of action filmmaking which Sokolov is more than adept at delivering, yet the overall storytelling is so light that you could blow the whole structure down with a simple blow of breath.

Maybe that will do for action enthusiasts wanting nothing more than just a collection of gory set-pieces, but for me there needed to be so much more for They Will Kill You to work as much as it wants to.

SO, TO SUM UP…

They Will Kill You is a disappointing action-horror that, despite some very well executed and appropriately gory fight sequences, has such a thin premise and bland set of characters that you’re ultimately left not caring that much about everything surrounding the carnage.