Kill List

This British low-budgeter arrives with an R18+ certificate and, plastered across its cover, a critics’ claim that it’s “the scariest hitman movie I have ever seen”. This immediately raises questions, since films about hired killers are usually not frightening, nor meant to be.

Also slightly unexpected is that when the film begins we’re in the terrain of a domestic drama hooked on an awkward suburban dinner party for four – more Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf than Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. So far, so good – a film that’s upending expectations.

The hosts are unemployed ex-squaddie Jay (Neil Maskell) and his Swedish blonde wife, Shel (MyAnna Buring), who before the guests arrive are bitterly arguing over the fancy lifestyle they can no longer afford. The visitors are the Irish Gal (Michael Smiley), an old army pal in the “security business” who once worked with Jay on a job mysteriously referred to simply as “Kiev”, and his hot girlfriend, Fiona (Emma Fryer), who works in the corporate retrenchment business.

The dinner party is lively, as well it needs to be, given it runs for at least 30 minutes and seems to be leading nowhere in particular. When we get to the second act – where Gal introduces Jay to a wealthy elderly man who hires them for a series of contract murders – things start to become clear. The movie convention is usually that hitman equals lone wolf. We don’t usually see them living out their marital discord and middle-class aspirations in the suburbs. The film has been set up to convince us these are real people, aided by solid performances. Smiley, whose background is comedy, is especially strong.

The pity is that any sense of believability so carefully built up is rapidly thrown away as the film dives into the outlandish. First we get a series of increasingly brutal contract hits (a member of a child-porn ring gets particularly short shrift with a hammer) before the final act delivers a “what the…?!” climax that comes out of nowhere and is drawn too obviously from The Wicker Man and Hammer Films’ now largely forgotten Dennis Wheatley adaptations.

It takes ambition to try to convincingly blend two genres, let alone three (social drama, crime thriller and horror). Unfortunately, it also takes the kind of craft skill and ingenuity that Ben Wheatley, the film’s director and co-writer, and his screenwriting partner, Amy Jump, fail to display. Instead, they deliver a film in which each of the three acts inhabits a different genre. That’s not a blend. It’s a list. But at least the film is well named.