Sure, They Will Kill You, But Can They Get on With It Already?

A documentary came out last year called Realm of Satan that was on my mind a lot during They Will Kill You, a new horror-comedy-action movie whose numbingly unrelenting pace perversely offers the mind a lot of time to wander. Realm of Satan is a near-wordless film that captures members of the Church of Satan in droll tableaux as they go about their day-to-day lives, sometimes engaging in rituals or group sex but more often seen puttering around in more mundane ways, hanging their linens out to dry or doing some beekeeping. Satanists may wear vinyl pants, the doc suggests, but they still put them on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us — a point that’s relevant to the context of They Will Kill You, which is the second new release in a row (after Ready or Not 2: Here I Come) about a young woman and her estranged sister going up against a cult of rich Devil worshippers aiming to turn them into bloody tributes. There’s a long tradition of coordinated Lucifer-centric villainy in horror movies that’s paralleled in periodic real-world panics involving occult child-trafficking rings. But it feels especially unfair to slap actual satanists, who are for the most part a bunch of sex-positive, atheistic goths, with responsibility for the ills of the world right now.

They Will Kill You was directed by Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov, who wrote the script with Predators’ Alex Litvak, and its baddies are just as satirically textureless as the ones in Ready or Not 2 — as exemplified by anti-aging beauty-company founder Sharon (Heather Graham) and generic sneering rich guy Kevin (Tom Felton), two of the more notable residents of the Virgil, the Rosemary’s Baby–style Manhattan high-rise where the movie takes place. What sets them apart is, in exchange for yearly sacrifices in the form of new hires who seem like they won’t be missed, the Virgil’s inhabitants have been granted a conditional immortality that makes the film’s action sequences more fun for a while and then more tedious. When Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) starts slaughtering her way through the hooded, masked tenants who intend to make her the latest offering to their dark lord, she discovers that they, along with the permanent staffers, have the ability to resurrect themselves, regrowing limbs and reattaching body parts and coming back for another round. They Will Kill You skews more Tarantino-esque in its grind-house tastes (and its thing for feet) with elaborate fight scenes involving swords and axes that get set on fire, but it also uses the regeneration device for squishier sequences like the one in which a character’s popped-out eyeball pursues Asia through a set of crawl spaces like a gruesome BB-8.

It is admittedly fun to see Graham with a tiny head because her previous one got chopped off and the new one hasn’t entirely grown back yet, but the novelty of the body-horror aspects of They Will Kill You peters out long before the movie’s run time does. Sokolov pulls off some fun camera movements and shoots his skirmishes without frantically cutting up the action, but the unkillable thing renders the fights meaningless, even as Asia — an ex-con in search of the little sister, Maria (Myha’la), she abandoned to their abusive father a decade earlier — proves to be a much more formidable opponent than the Virgil’s residents were prepared for. Asia reunites with her estranged sibling and, with the help of embittered staffer Ray (Paterson Joseph), tries to make her way up through the fortresslike building to find an escape. But there’s almost no forward momentum, much less a plan the sisters attempt to follow. They slaughter satanists, they get away, they’re caught again, and flashbacks occasionally reveal more about how Asia ended up banging on the door of the Virgil as the unlucky latest sacrificial candidate and how Maria ended up as one of the vetted housekeepers.

They Will Kill You is too sloppy to come up with much by way of world-building — the closest thing to an idea it has is its interest in the employees, who are granted a kind of demi-membership in the cult. They’re complicit in the killings and share the ability to live forever but only as perpetual workers whose immortality can be wiped out if they make a misstep. Lilith Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette), the group’s leader, is a servant who worked her way up over the years, earning her place as the building’s manager through her devotion to the job (and to Satan, naturally). She’s Irish and married to Ray, who’s Black; the two found acceptance at the Virgil a century ago when everyone else rejected their relationship. That’s an intriguing element that the movie unfortunately has no interest in actually exploring. Same with the larger idea of what it means to be part of an eternal underclass, even at the cost of one’s soul. They Will Kill You may start off with a quote attributed to Benvenuto Cellini about how “when the poor give to the rich, the Devil laughs.” But for all its bloodshed, the movie’s not sharp enough to land a cutting blow — or even to break skin.