Kill List: Ben Wheatley's Bait-and-Switch into the Dark

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) is the film that made me trust him, and it did it by lying to me for forty minutes. You sit down to what appears to be a hard British drama about a marriage falling apart at a dinner table, and by the closing frames you are somewhere that should not be reachable from that starting point, a torchlit hillside where robed figures are chanting. The astonishing thing is that the route is real. Watch it a second time and every turn is signposted; the film only feels like a betrayal because you were not paying the right kind of attention. That is the trick, and it is a genuine one.

Amy Jump - vo.rs

Kill List: Ben Wheatley's Bait-and-Switch into the Dark