Director – Kirill Sokolov – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 94m
****
A young woman, searching from her missing sister, takes a job as a cleaner in a mysterious, wealthy, New York apartment block – horror action movie is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th
This has been sold as a horror / paranoia conspiracy thriller about a New York apartment building in the mould of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Yet while its opening set up has echoes of that film, it turns out to be something altogether very different.
Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz from The Bad Guys, Pierre Perifel, 2022; Joker, Todd Phillips, 2019; Deadpool 2, David Leitch, 2018), her younger sister Maria (Myha’la from Dead Man’s Wire, Gus van Sant, 2025; Bodies Bodies Bodies, Halina Reijn, 2022) in tow, flees their abusive father. He tracks them down in a grocery store, outside which she later shoots and hospitalises him before going on the run alone.
Ten years later, she applies for a housekeeper’s job at the Virgil, a nine-storey New York apartment building. The door is answered by Irish building superintendent Lily (Patricia Arquette from Boyhood, Richard Linklater, 2014; Lost Highway, David Lynch, 1997; True Romance, Tony Scott, 1993) who introduces her to a few of the tenants in the lobby including Sharon (Heather Graham from Austin Powers 2; The Spy Who Shagged Me, Jay Roach, 1999; Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) and Kevin (Tom Felton – Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter films, 2001-2011) before showing her to her room. On the way, they meet Lily’s husband Ray (Paterson Joseph from Wonka, Paul King, 2023; The Beach, Danny Boyle, 2000; In the Name of the Father, Jim Sheridan, 1993) who abrasively ignores what she tells him to do and clearly has his own agenda.
It’s constantly raining outside the building, a place which is not as it seems. While Asia takes a shower, someone writes They Will Kill You on the steamed-up mirror with their finger. Strange noises emanate from the ventilation system. Asia misses the messages, yet senses something is not quite right enough to barricade the door of her room with a chair. That isn’t enough to stop a pig-mask-wearing figure in a hooded cape entering her room and loitering by the bed. The figure is the first of several to appear.
At this point, the narrative confounds expectations by having Asia go on the attack with a sword in the first of many astonishing fight sequences which impress in terms of not only stunt choreography but also sheer limb-lopping audacity. The ante is further upped by the starling revelation that these assailants, who turn out to include Sharon and Kevin, possess the ability to fit their lopped appendages back into place in full working order. You can’t even see the join. So now our heroine knows that, no matter how much slashing and lopping she may do, it won’t remain effective for long because her enemy will be able to rapidly restore itself, reform and regroup.
Escaping through a trapdoor into an underfloor crawlway system, Asia is pursued by both Sharon and Kevin. She manages to hack Sharon’s head to pieces, unaware that Sharon’s severed eyeball is following her and relaying what it sees back to Sharon. (This makes sense as you watch, but not if you think about it afterwards, because Sharon’s brain is slashed to ribbons at this point). The eyeball visual effects reach their unlikely zenith in a sequence where the pursuing eyeball employs its elasticated optic nerve to catapault itself up a lift shaft. Could they perhaps have been inspired by Fiend Without A Face (Arthur Crabtree, 1958) in which alien creatures comprise heads which push themselves along the ground using their spinal columns?
A further twist reveals that one of the hotel maids is Maria, Asia’s younger sister, who Asia has come to rescue. But the girl has come to terms with being abandoned into her father’s care ten years go by her elder sister, feels herself to be part of the Virgil Building family, and doesn’t want to be rescued…
The phrase “our latest offering” spoken to the assembled kitchen maids early on telegraphs the prospect, confirmed by Ray, Lily’s husband, that Asia is the latest in a long line of monthly, Satanic, human sacrifices carried out under a contract between the Virgil’s residents and their landlord the Devil, represented at the film’s climax as a talking pig’s head on a stick (voice; James Remar) upon whose flesh their names are written.
A further memorable sequence has Asia set fire to the head of an axe (via petrol and her trusty Samurai lighter) and then wield it against her assailants.
The press handouts inform us that the script was called, in an early incarnation, Nine Floors Of Hell, which gives some idea how intrinsic to the whole is the Virgil building in which the piece is set. Director Kirill Sokolov and co-writer Alex Litvak seem to have worked out what happens on every floor in the building, although aside from designating the first floor as a non-stop mass sex orgy since otherwise “eternity can get pretty boring”, few of these designations have survived into the shooting script.
Nevertheless, there remains a strong sense of what ventilation systems, crawlspaces and lift shafts go from which point to which other point in the building, a convincing internal geography bolstered by unrelenting blood and earthen tones throughout the walls of rooms and corridors. Also effective is the visual conception of photographing crawlspaces and the like as if they were ant farms behind glass, so that characters move along a tunnel through the middle of the screen, above and below which are screen black. It sounds (and is) a simple enough idea, but I can’t recall another film ever having done this. (The nearest I can get is the shot in Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock, 1929, where the camera rises up the side of a stairwell as if a wall had been cut away.)
Effective during viewing but ultimately forgettable, this is efficient if shallow horror action fodder that should provide a satisfying evening’s viewing for anyone who doesn’t mind their action served with lashings of extreme, limb-lopping violence, blood and gore, and their horror presented with a distinctly Satanic flavour. Or anyone likely to by satisfied by the film’s indisputable high point, its brief sequence featuring a severed, conscious and mobile eye.
They Will Kill You is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 27th.
Trailer: