Movies & TV They Will Kill You They Will Kill You Is a Gore Fest Running Thin on Substance If I had a nickel for every time a woman tried to save her sister from wealthy devil-worshippers, etc… By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on March 31, 2026 Image: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Warner Bros. To begin discussing They Will Kill You, there’s an immediate aside that comes up about the fact that two films featuring devil-worshipping wealthy folks who are trying to sacrifice a woman and her sister to appease their dark lord were released within a week of each other, and the plots were so similar that the trailer of one was cut to omit that fact entirely. (The trailer for this one, in fact.) Given the state of things, I’m hardly one to look askance at two similarly decorated cakes and call myself the injured party. Having said that, the greatest praise I can offer this film is that it is a diverting way to spend 94 minutes. If that’s all you’re looking for (and your tummy is unbothered by excessive, silly gore), go forth and enjoy! Extra cake for you, everybody is a winner. My first point of disconnect from the experience is a tonal shift that occurs right at the start. The opening of the film features Asia Reeves (Zazie Beetz) and her younger sister trying to escape a sadistic home. It is a dark, tense sequence with nothing remotely fantastical about it, and we get the background of our protagonist in full: Asia shoots their father when he catches up to them, but on hearing the sirens, she runs. She leaves her sister with their abuser still alive, and winds up getting caught anyway. Ten years later, she’s arrived for her new job at The Virgil, a fancy building in New York with a dark secret. If you assume that she’s looking for her little sister, Maria (Myha’la), you’d be head of the class. The film promptly descends into gonzo violence and absurdity, a world that feels totally disconnected from its first ten minutes: We learn that the building’s residents have a pact with Satan for eternal life, and their goal is to sacrifice Asia to keep that pact. They are immortal, so Asia can’t kill these people—only slow them down. Her sister is a maid in the building, and sometimes “the help” also get to join the pact (though they stay “the help,” of course). So Asia is stuck trying to outwit a bunch of wealthy, unkillable acolytes. There’s no more filling in between the lines; that’s the entirety of the story. What’s more, there’s practically no dialogue from that point on outside of questions about where Asia is, and why they need her to just give up and allow herself to be sacrificed. It feels as though screenwriter Alex Litvak and co-writer/director Kirill Sokolov had a book full of action sequences they wanted to film and made some sparse choices about the plot as an excuse to knit the whole thing together. Obviously, They Will Kill You has the vaguest echoes of the seminal Get Out and its more direct companion Ready Or Not, but both of those films were explicit commentaries about the institutions they were critiquing. They Will Kill You pretends to try—there are one or two pieces of extremely on-the-nose dialogue to that end—but knows it doesn’t really have to. Asking your audience to root against wealthy death cults isn’t a tall order when the general populace is pretty fed up with the uber-rich pretending that they have society’s best interests at heart.  Acknowledging that there is a clear racial aspect to this disparity could have been one place where They Will Kill You distinguished itself. The outline of a suggestion is there via The Virgil’s (mostly) POC staff and (mostly) white residents, the elevation of its superintendent (Patricia Arquette’s Lillith Woodhouse) and her husband (Paterson Joseph’s Ray Woodhouse), and the disagreement between Lillith and Ray about continuing to participate in this heinous ritual. But the way the film goes about addressing these issues only raises more questions: Ray tries to help Asia, and when he’s caught, he tells his wife that he used to believe in what they did for Satan because they were “cleaning up the streets” but now they were just murdering unfortunates. So, apparently, Ray thinks that some impoverished people are worth saving and others aren’t? Or that certain types of criminals deserve to die? That kinda seems like a big deal? The action sequences are cribbing a lot from giants of the genre in ways that feel frankly self-indulgent. Asia begins her evening at The Virgil sitting up in bed and clutching a lighter with a samurai etched into its casing, every flip of the lid suggesting the cut of a katana and a spray of red. It turns out that Asia also packed a machete, and soon she dispatches her first assailants with Kill Bill-esque gouts of blood. Later on in the film, Maria asks Asia where she learned to fight like that, and Asia glibly replies, “Prison.” You’d assume that meant we were in for a flashback of epic proportions, where we finally get introduced to Asia’s sensei? Ah… nope. That was the whole joke. Also, the samurai-style trappings are quickly dispensed with and never really return. There are grotesque body horror elements to contend with as well, as the immortal denizens of the building recover from every indignity that Asia visits on them. The only one that really garners the enjoyment it should is Sharon Vanderbilt’s (Heather Graham) plucked eyeball that rolls about trying to find Asia as her head regrows. It’s a lot of fun (even if the “regrowth” aspect doesn’t make much sense) until you notice that the eyeball can apparently hear all by itself? Sans ears? At which point, a really enjoyable bit promptly falls flat. Even noting that, I sort of wish the eyeball had become more of a main character throughout the film’s duration—it was one place where the film’s better tonality comes clear. The pig head on a stick as the avatar for the Devil is less exciting than they clearly think it is, though. If you’ve seen Peter Jackson’s earlier zombie films or anything Sam Raimi puts out or you went through a Cronenberg phase, this is just more of that thing you’ve already seen done better. The movie keeps upping the ante for action, and ends in the sort of bloodbath you’d expect, but the machinations stop being interesting long before we reach the summit. There’s also setup for a sequel that feels entirely unearned, though not surprising. It’s a shame because Beetz deserves a better career than the one she’s currently embarked on, and she is dead fun to watch. Someone give her a better action hero than this.[end-mark] The post <i>They Will Kill You</i> Is a Gore Fest Running Thin on Substance appeared first on Reactor.