Kill List

Jay is a former soldier who has been working as a hitman with friend Gal but after a job went wrong in Kiev he has been avoiding working for eight months. Now his wife thinks it is time for him to get back to work. After some pressure he agrees to do another job with Gal; they meet the client and learn that there are to be three targets on their kill list. The first is relatively easy if a little surprising; things get very messy on the second job but that is nothing compared to the third; that is downright weird taking the film and its characters from a crime film into the territory of horror.

This certainly won't be for everybody. It is brutally violent at times; this is done in a disturbingly realistic manner with nothing stylised or humorous to make it easier to watch. The change of genres comes as a genuine surprises even though there are earlier hints that something strange is going on; notably how the victims react as they are about to be murdered. Thankfully it isn't entirely bleak; some of Jay and Gal's conversations are quite funny. The cast does a fine job; most notably Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley as Jay and Gal and MyAnna Buring as Shel. The cinematography is great giving the early sections of the film a very real feel while the conclusion is made to feel like a nightmare. Overall I'd definitely recommend this to anybody who doesn't mind being disturbed and enjoys a conclusion that leave them thinking about what they have just watched.

Lodging itself eventually in the creepy-people-doing-creepy-things tradition of religious/occult horror films like The Wicker Man and Rosemary's Baby, director Ben Wheatley's hit-man horror flick Kill List comes on, initially, like a bad-boy bit of British Social realism.

It's rough around the edges, shaggy and idiosyncratically edited, with dialogue so unpolished and authentic-seeming that it's occasionally hard to decipher. It's filled with a handful of legitimately great performances by actors allowed to work improvisationally, seemingly, lending the first half of the film an incredibly charming unpredictability, a low-key volatility that had me bouncing back and forth between moments of disturbing darkness and happy familial pleasantries. Then it gets really crazy.

Jay and Gal are ex-army, estranged friends and partners in crime. Eight months after a disastrous (and mysterious) gig in Kiev, Jay's home life is disintegrating, and after a raucous dinner party with his ex-partner and his creepy new girlfriend he agrees to get back in the saddle and take a job. They're given a list - three targets - and soon they're settling back into a charmingly macabre groove, carousing "salesmen" on the road from town to town and target to target. But after an inadvertent discovery during a routine bit of hit-man work derails their plans, the pair realize they may be part of something much bigger - and much darker - than a back-room murder-for-hire.

Kill List a stunning piece of very smart genre filmmaking. Wheatley not-so-gently inserts chunks of spooky, disturbing horror into what's already a charmingly dark kitchen sink drama. It's this transition - that either a social realist framework can be twisted into a framework supporting high horror or that a horror film can work filled with improvisational dialogue and broody bits of working-class British anxiety - that makes the film such an immense, jarring pleasure.

Will it work for horror fans used to slick, post-'80s supernatural spookery? Will Ken Loach fans do with a little blood and forest horror? Who knows. For fans of both, it's a stunning - literally - hybrid, something completely unexpected, a real discovery. Kill List is a brilliant idea, brilliantly well executed.

An odd, and oddly effective, mix of hit-man thriller and cult horror, KILL LIST is one of the most talked-about British horrors films in recent years. Imagine my surprise, then, to see it premiering on television a scant year after release, and of course I jumped at the chance to catch up with what is by all accounts a controversial little movie.

For the most part, KILL LIST works. It unsettles and creeps you out courtesy of lots of foreboding, ominous sequences (accompanied by music which is a little too overdone at times) punctuated by moments of stark and shocking violence. Writer/director Ben Wheatley does good to build the sense of mystery, keeping his character backgrounds shady and throwing in random clues that make little sense at the time but help build towards the feeling of something big as the climax approaches. It's also one of the nastiest mainstream films I've seen in a while, with one scene involving a hammer taking screen violence to a whole new level.

Sad, then, that the ending of this film is such a disappointment, an ambiguous tie-up that seems shoehorned in purely to provide a few more exploitative shocks instead of making any kind of sense whatsoever. The mystery is left just that, a mystery, and at times I was infuriated at the lack of resolution. The film also veers away from the modern day realism it has built beforehand to hark back to the Hammer Horror days of yesteryear. Not that I have a problem with Hammer films – I love them, but in their own time and quaint-ish setting. The all-too-familiar horror tropes of the climax just feel overdone, coincidentally almost exactly the same problem I had with another recent watch, THE LAST EXORCISM.

The cast acquit themselves well with the script, for the most part, and there's a level of kitchen sink-style authenticity to much of the dialogue; also some natural, unforced humour which offsets all the nastiness. Neil Maskell is very good when his lead character is asked to do the more disturbing things, although I never quite bought him as the family man he's shown to be at the outset. Michael Smiley is equally as good as Maskell's buddy and colleague, and the film's central pairing works very well indeed. Original British horror cinema, with life and style all of its own (not merely following Hollywood trends), has stalled somewhat in the last decade, but with the likes of KILL LIST we could be in for something of a renaissance

Very surprised that the rating for this film has balanced out at 6.4 after twelve years (and that this will only be review no. 310). I don't even like Horror films but rated Kill List at 7-8/10 and fail to see how anyone could turn their nose up to this nasty, gritty little piece of work (many of the most recent reviews are a mystifying 1-3/10). It's psychological horror, rather than gore - although the 'hammer scene' is brutal and by all accounts still a production mystery - and, if the story elements weren't already disturbing enough, the brooding, menacing tension is amplified further by the haunting whistling, original sound design and jump editing style, which adds an intentionally rough edge to an already unpleasant mix. The cast are mostly strong, Neil Maskell powers it through from the first scene and the look on Gal's face in the car when the pair realise exactly what they've got themselves into says it all.

It's been a while since I've seen a film that both attracted and repulsed me. "Kill List" has managed to do just that.

It's a difficult film to describe. Suffice it to say, it's been tagged a horror film and that the "similar" films referenced in other reviews give too much away. Let me just attempt to give you some idea of what you might experience if you choose to take a chance and seek out this film.

Before I begin, it must be said that this is a British film, and some of the accents are thicker than the Great Grimpen Mire. Sit back, and let your ears adjust.

The first third of the film might give you the impression it's a family drama. It isn't.

The second third of the film might give you the impression that it's a crime drama. It isn't.

Then comes the final third. It will make you question everything you've seen up to that point and either infuriate you or cause you to manually lift your jaw off the sticky theatre floor. It's out there. Waaaay out there.

The film does a terrific job of building a mood and layering suspense with discomfort. It is an incredibly violent film, graphic in a way I haven't seen since Gasper Noes' "Irreversible." The violence is intrinsic to the film and to its protagonist, but that doesn't make it any easier to watch.

This film bothered me, and except for the extreme violence, I can't really explain why. It left me feeling uneasy and uncomfortable - but I couldn't stop watching. I have so many questions about what I just watched that I will probably watch it again – and I will probably still be bothered.

When's the last time you said that about a film that wasn't a documentary?

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