I really don’t know how to rate this one. I almost feel like I just watched two different films, and I absolutely adored one of them. It starts as a bit of a domestic drama, really. I don’t like that sort of thing, and at the beginning I was thinking, “Gawd, can we just get past this bit?” but actually, over the course of the film, those little interpersonal moments become the best bits. Kill List builds extremely slowly, because the relationships are really the most important thing, not the violence. Ben Wheatley, the director, wants to make sure you’re on board with Jay, Gal, and Shel, and so he spends a lot of time on their characterizations. It totally works.
The film is beautifully shot, and it really should have won some awards for editing, as well. This is as interestingly-edited a film as I’ve seen in years. I love the way it cuts from these huge arguments between Jay and Shel to them cuddling in an armchair or whatever. When they dance, they wrap themselves up in each other completely; it isn’t so much dancing as just sort of embracing and swaying. Their relationship is very real, very much two people struggling to deal with life and sometimes turning on each other, but ultimately there’s always love, always forgiveness, no matter how ugly things get. At the beginning it just seems like it’s a typical bad movie marriage, with a nagging harpy of a wife and an emotionally damaged drunk as the husband. As you get to know them, though, you see that it’s really a very strong marriage; it’s just also very troubled, just like real marriages are. You connect with them in a way that you basically never connect with characters in a horror film.
The friendship between Jay and Gal is the best and most believable I’ve seen in forever, as well. Even though they bicker a lot, and even fight occasionally, you kind of have the feeling that they can always depend on each other. Like, even if Jay’s marriage collapsed, even if he lost everything else that mattered to him, he would still have Gal and he'd be okay. There's a bit where Shel and Gal are talking, and they're worried about Jay. Gal takes Shel's face in his hands, kisses her lightly, just to comfort her, and then they embrace. In most movies you'd be worried that the husband would walk in and see this, and get the wrong idea. But you know that can't happen here; even if Jay did walk in at that moment, he would know that Shel and Gal weren't fooling around on him. He knows that he can trust these people, and so do we.
Michael Smiley turns in a really very strong performance as Gal. Much is made over the course of the film of the trouble Jay has controlling his anger, but Gal’s constant wisecracks, even when he’s angry or the situation doesn’t call for joking, are much more…unstable, I guess you could say, or perhaps destabilizing would be better. Gal has a way of making it feel like our grip on the reality of the film’s universe is always very tenuous.
So at the point in the third act where Jay and Gal are lying in wait for the third target on the titular Kill List, this is a solid eight-star film, maybe even a nine. The foundation was laid so carefully and everything was built so precisely and logically onto it, and then…everything sort of falls apart. I mean, everything after that point is still as technically well-done as what came before (I’m not the first reviewer to point out how spectacular the night-time cinematography is, for example), but I just couldn’t help feeling a little let down by that whole sequence in the woods and the tunnels. And once Jay gets back home, and he and Shel are setting up their defenses against the cult, you think it’s gonna stabilize but it just gets worse. I get the ending, and I see how it ties into the rest of the film, but I couldn’t help thinking, “You’ve created this masterful work of art, you’ve taken all this time and all this care, just to get here? This ending doesn’t deserve the story you’ve been telling.”
I guess I’m kind of done with death-cult movies. The idea was kind of an overused plot device even in the seventies and eighties, and it seems to me that all the juice has been wrung out of it at this point. Maybe that’s just personal preference, but I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to see all those people walking through the woods with torches.
So, like I say, up until the last half-hour or so, it’s at least an eight, but after that it drops to at best a five for me. So how do I rate it? Do I take the average of the two scores, or a weighted average based on amount of eight-star vs. five-star time? Do I just give it a five, since the ending is what’s in your mind after the film is over? I just don’t know. I think I’ll have to see it again to judge for sure. For right now, I think it’s going to just have to remain unrated. Maybe the ending will reconcile better the second time around. I hope so. I’ll report back either way.
The film is beautifully shot, and it really should have won some awards for editing, as well. This is as interestingly-edited a film as I’ve seen in years. I love the way it cuts from these huge arguments between Jay and Shel to them cuddling in an armchair or whatever. When they dance, they wrap themselves up in each other completely; it isn’t so much dancing as just sort of embracing and swaying. Their relationship is very real, very much two people struggling to deal with life and sometimes turning on each other, but ultimately there’s always love, always forgiveness, no matter how ugly things get. At the beginning it just seems like it’s a typical bad movie marriage, with a nagging harpy of a wife and an emotionally damaged drunk as the husband. As you get to know them, though, you see that it’s really a very strong marriage; it’s just also very troubled, just like real marriages are. You connect with them in a way that you basically never connect with characters in a horror film.
The friendship between Jay and Gal is the best and most believable I’ve seen in forever, as well. Even though they bicker a lot, and even fight occasionally, you kind of have the feeling that they can always depend on each other. Like, even if Jay’s marriage collapsed, even if he lost everything else that mattered to him, he would still have Gal and he'd be okay. There's a bit where Shel and Gal are talking, and they're worried about Jay. Gal takes Shel's face in his hands, kisses her lightly, just to comfort her, and then they embrace. In most movies you'd be worried that the husband would walk in and see this, and get the wrong idea. But you know that can't happen here; even if Jay did walk in at that moment, he would know that Shel and Gal weren't fooling around on him. He knows that he can trust these people, and so do we.
Michael Smiley turns in a really very strong performance as Gal. Much is made over the course of the film of the trouble Jay has controlling his anger, but Gal’s constant wisecracks, even when he’s angry or the situation doesn’t call for joking, are much more…unstable, I guess you could say, or perhaps destabilizing would be better. Gal has a way of making it feel like our grip on the reality of the film’s universe is always very tenuous.
So at the point in the third act where Jay and Gal are lying in wait for the third target on the titular Kill List, this is a solid eight-star film, maybe even a nine. The foundation was laid so carefully and everything was built so precisely and logically onto it, and then…everything sort of falls apart. I mean, everything after that point is still as technically well-done as what came before (I’m not the first reviewer to point out how spectacular the night-time cinematography is, for example), but I just couldn’t help feeling a little let down by that whole sequence in the woods and the tunnels. And once Jay gets back home, and he and Shel are setting up their defenses against the cult, you think it’s gonna stabilize but it just gets worse. I get the ending, and I see how it ties into the rest of the film, but I couldn’t help thinking, “You’ve created this masterful work of art, you’ve taken all this time and all this care, just to get here? This ending doesn’t deserve the story you’ve been telling.”
I guess I’m kind of done with death-cult movies. The idea was kind of an overused plot device even in the seventies and eighties, and it seems to me that all the juice has been wrung out of it at this point. Maybe that’s just personal preference, but I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to see all those people walking through the woods with torches.
So, like I say, up until the last half-hour or so, it’s at least an eight, but after that it drops to at best a five for me. So how do I rate it? Do I take the average of the two scores, or a weighted average based on amount of eight-star vs. five-star time? Do I just give it a five, since the ending is what’s in your mind after the film is over? I just don’t know. I think I’ll have to see it again to judge for sure. For right now, I think it’s going to just have to remain unrated. Maybe the ending will reconcile better the second time around. I hope so. I’ll report back either way.
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