They Will Kill You (2026)
There's a moment in They Will Kill You that I keep coming back to. The screen goes almost completely black, and all you can see is a flaming axe carving through the darkness, each swing briefly illuminating a fight in bloody, flickering flashes. It's properly spectacular, the kind of image that makes you sit forward in your seat and think: yes, this is exactly what going to the cinema is for. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the film eventually loses the plot so comprehensively that by the time the credits roll, all that goodwill has been almost entirely spent.
The setup is a cracker. Two sisters escape their captors. One makes it out clean. The other gets dragged back. Ten years later, the survivor has dedicated her life to tracking down her missing sibling, and the film wastes no time getting into the thick of it. These opening stretches are a genuinely great time. Director Kirill Sokolov is clearly swinging for the Kill Bill aesthetic, and he lands it more often than not. The choreography is stylised, the colour palette is bold, the blood spray is gloriously, cartoonishly gratuitous. It's pulpy and propulsive and enormous fun.
The acting sits somewhere in the "perfectly fine" bracket throughout. Nobody is embarrassing themselves, nobody is turning in career-best work. The cast do what the script asks of them and leave it at that. But I have to give a special mention to Paterson Joseph, who most British viewers will forever associate with Johnson in Peep Show. Seeing him pivot into something considerably darker and more menacing here is a genuine treat, and he brings a weight to his scenes that the film badly needs. It's the kind of casting that makes you realise how much good character work can do for a genre piece like this.
The fight choreography is solid throughout, too. It's not going to trouble John Wick's crown anytime soon, but it's a cut above what you'd usually expect at this level, and it keeps the adrenaline pumping consistently through the first half. The flaming axe sequence I mentioned earlier is the obvious highlight, but there are several other set pieces that show real visual invention. Sokolov clearly has an eye for this stuff, and for a while I was thinking this could sit comfortably alongside something like Hardcore Henry as a film that throws conventional storytelling out the window in favour of relentless, inventive action spectacle.
And then the film takes its turn. About halfway through, They Will Kill You lurches hard into satanic supernatural territory, and what had felt like a grounded (if stylised) revenge thriller suddenly becomes something else entirely. I don't have a problem with genre films evolving or taking risks. Some of my favourite films do exactly that. But the shift here feels less like a bold creative choice and more like the story running out of road and grabbing the nearest available mythology to fill the gap. The supernatural elements aren't properly foreshadowed, they're not satisfyingly integrated with what came before, and they land with a thud precisely when the film should be building towards something genuinely moving. The whole setup, two sisters, a decade of searching, the desperate weight of that bond, promises an emotional payoff that the film simply never delivers. The mystical detour swallows it whole.
What's left is a strange, lopsided experience. The first hour is genuinely entertaining, visually inventive, and intermittently brilliant. The second half feels like it belongs to a different, less coherent film. I came out of it having enjoyed myself well enough in the moment, but feeling oddly deflated. If you're looking for something similarly genre-blending with a dark, unsettling edge, I'd actually point you towards Late Night with the Devil, which manages its own tonal high-wire act with considerably more control.
Two and a half stars. Worth seeing for the craft on display in that first half, and absolutely worth seeing for Paterson Joseph. Just be prepared for the wheels to come off before the finish line.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2026 | Watched: 2026-06-15
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · Sky Go · Now TV Cinema · HBO Max
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · HBO Max
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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