Ben Wheatley's 'Kill List': Kitchen Sink Surrealism with a Bullet

Ben Wheatley's second indie feature, a genre-bender about a hitman's last contract before going straight, is so hell-bent on frightening you that he misses any chance at a connection with his flawed characters.

Kill List revels in the sacrilegious, gruesome killings carried out by the antihero hitman-familyman Jay (Niel Maskell) and his business partner (Michael Smiley) who offers him one last job with a big payoff. Our hero is reluctant at first, having failed a previous mission. But once he accepts, Jay tortures and mutilates his victims before killing them, taking sadistic pleasure in destroying his helpless contracts.

Wheatley likes to mix genres as he did in his debut film Down Terrace, also about a hitman. Kill List opens as a kitchen sink drama rife with ultra-realism (nothing happens for 25 minutes), then becomes surreal and darkly humorous. In the final act, surrealism transforms to straight horror as Jay and his friend escape demonic masked beings.

However, while Down Terrace stayed in the realm of (questionable) reality, Kill List tries to be all that it is not. Rather than take the time to reveal the humanity of Jay's sadistic character or at least let us enjoy watching a master assassin at work, Wheatley cops out with his genre-reversal which fails to connect.

Overall the movie feels like it was shot by a film student just becoming hip to David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and Chan-wook Park. There's the loud dirgy soundtrack and abrupt cut-to-title cards of The Shining; hammer-bludgeoning brutality of Old Boy; the mysterious client that hires Jay (Who is he? Who cares?) is reminiscent of so many Lynch-ian bad guys. Such films work because we care about the characters. Even if they are evil we want them to win.

All these recycled scare tactics from such cinematic masters simply do not work in Kill List and are ultimately numbing.

Kill List can be viewed on-demand through IFC Midnight.