They Will Kill You
Director: Kirill Sokolov
Date Created: 2026-03-17 14:38
4
Pros
- Sound design used as a storytelling device
- Zazie Beetz carries a full action-horror lead with total conviction
- World-building lore that goes far deeper than the genre standard
- A cast assembled with genuine enthusiasm, every face that appears earns its moment
- Cinematography that treats the camera as a participant, not an observer
Cons
- Loses its edge around the hour mark
- The tonal shift from personal revenge thriller to immortal cult
- Some of the lore exposition slows the frenetic pacing
- Compared to Why Don’t You Just Die!, the stakes feel slightly diffused by the sheer number of moving parts
- The crawl-tunnel sequences, while funny, briefly undercut the film’s otherwise sleek visual menace
Film Title: They Will Kill You
Cast: Zazie Beetz, Patricia Arquette, Myha’la, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, Willie Ludik, Angus Sampson, James Remar (voice), Heather Graham, Dorothy Ann Gould, Brandon Auret, Chris van Rensburg
Director: Kirill Sokolov
Writers: Kirill Sokolov, Alex Litvak
Distribution: New Line Cinema Production: New Line Cinema, Noc turna Domain Entertainment
Release Date: March 27, 2026
Watched on: Rental
Review by: Mother of Movies
This review of They Will Kill You is not spoiler-free. We don’t deep dive into the lore, but we do talk about the film’s inner workings and some deaths.
Zazie Beetz Was Born for This
Loved it. Didn’t love-love it. And that distinction counts, because They Will Kill You is the kind of film that sounds, on paper, like an absolute slam dunk, and it very nearly is. Kirill Sokolov’s follow-up to Why Don’t You Just Die! is a blood-soaked, sword-swinging, robe-wearing slaughter. Set inside a Manhattan building with neon green windows and what appears to be a full-service cult operating out of the hotel. It is genuinely a joy to watch. It just doesn’t smack you the way his debut did.
Asia Reaves arrives at the Virgil building with a housekeeping job, a complicated past, and a suitcase that, in one of the film’s best reveals, turns out to be packed with swords. Zazie Beetz is magnetic from the first frame, and the film wastes no time establishing that she is not here to make beds. The early setup is phenomenal. Sokolov layers in details with a precision that rewards attention.
Every amplified sound effect, every camera swing, every fisheye lens crawl down a corridor is doing something. A shower curtain closing sounds like a blade being drawn. A suitcase snapping shut lands like a gunshot. It’s a sensory trick he used in Why Don’t You Just Die! and it’s just as effective here, maybe more so, because the scale is bigger and the stakes are stranger.
Patricia Arquette as Lilith is exactly the kind of casting that makes you pause the film to appreciate it. She’s real and watchable in equal measure. Heather Graham, Angus Sampson, and the late James Remar, voicing a devil residing inside a pig’s head, round out a lineup that has no business being this committed to material this gleefully unhinged. The pig’s head alone is a piece of world-building that goes further than expected and ices the cake.
The Virgil Building
Most of the people sent to kill Asia are dressed in hooded robes. The visual consistency of that choice pays off constantly, it just looks cool, every single time, regardless of what’s happening around it. There’s a moment where Asia pulls a sword from her bag and an explosion of feather-down from the linens fills the frame. You see it coming. You enjoy it anyway. That’s the film operating at its best: telegraphing its own moves and still making you grin.
The gore is generous and purposeful. One particular Sharon murder, the second or third, depending on how you’re counting, is extraordinarily messy, and the film leans into it with the confidence of a director who knows exactly how much is too much and goes slightly past it on purpose. A quieter but equally memorable moment: Sharon peering through a massive bullet hole in one of her fellow immortals. It’s a small, witty visual that communicates the lore more efficiently than a page of dialogue ever could.
Around the hour mark, something loosens. The lore, deals with the devil, centuries-old pacts, a curated list of the wealthy and chosen made immortal, is detailed and clearly thought through, but it starts to weigh on the pacing in a way that Why Don’t You Just Die! never did. That film ran on luck-based misfortune, a tighter, more volatile engine. Here, the immortality clause, as inventive as it is, eventually dulls the tension.
If even a sliver of skin is enough to bring someone back, the stakes shift, and not always in the film’s favour.
The tunnel sequences, where characters are forced to crawl on all fours through the building’s innards, tip briefly into unintentional comedy, which is fine in a horror comedy, but the scrambling feels less controlled than the rest of the film’s choreography. It’s a small thing. The momentum recovers. But it’s there.
The Tonal Tightrope It Mostly Walks
They Will Kill You wears its horror-comedy label honestly. The tonal range is wide. It’s dark one moment, cartoonishly violent the next, and occasionally touching when Asia’s search for her sister Maria comes back into focus. The music drops in and out strategically, used less as a score and more as punctuation, nudging you toward a feeling rather than telling you what to have. It’s a smart choice that keeps the film feeling alive rather than produced.
The cinematography is next-level, consistent with Sokolov’s established visual language but more expansive here. The camera is always moving with intention, fisheye lenses, whip-pans, held mirrors filling with steam, and the Virgil building’s neon-lit interiors give the whole thing a texture that’s distinctive. This is not a film that looks like anything else in its genre right now.
Ultimately, They Will Kill You is the kind of movie you walk away from happy, warmly happy, even as you try to work out why you’re not doing cartwheels. The setup is extraordinary, the cast is exceptional, the violence is spectacular, and the world Sokolov has built inside those walls is one of the more original horror playgrounds in recent memory.
What’s here is still more than enough to make it one of 2026’s most entertaining watches and she does fight a talking pig so….
Verdict & Rating
They Will Kill You is rated
4 Robed and Ready out of 5
Loved It. Didn’t Love-Love It.
Kirill Sokolov’s follow-up to Why Don’t You Just Die! is a neon-lit, blood-soaked horror comedy that runs on pure kinetic energy and a cast that has absolutely no business being this good together. Zazie Beetz tears through it like she was built for the role, and the Virgil building is one of the most inventive horror settings in recent memory. It doesn’t quite hit the same euphoric heights as his debut. It’s still one of the most entertaining things you’ll watch this year.
Kirill Sokolov Stamp
Kirill Sokolov announced himself with Why Don’t You Just Die! (2018), a Russian-language home-invasion black comedy that ran on escalating misfortune, practical gore, and a gleefully mean sense of humour. His visual signature, amplified diegetic sound, aggressive camera movement, and a fondness for letting a single location do most of the dramatic heavy lifting, carries directly into They Will Kill You, now operating on a larger canvas with an English-language cast and a New Line Cinema budget behind it. The jump in scale hasn’t softened his instincts; if anything, the production resources let him go further with the visual ideas he was already executing on a shoestring.
Streaming Options for They Will Kill You
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“A sword pulled from a bag of feather-down linens has never looked so outrageously, perfectly right.”
— Mother of Movies
Similar Titles to They Will Kill You
• Why Don’t You Just Die! (2018) — Sokolov’s debut; single-location, maximum carnage, essential viewing.
• Bullet Train (2022) — Stacked ensemble, relentless pacing, action comedy that leans hard into its own absurdity.
• Mayhem (2017) — Office building siege, contained chaos, gleefully violent and tonally unhinged.
• Guns Akimbo (2019) — High-concept action-horror comedy with a lead forced into impossible situations at speed.
• Sew Torn (2024) — One of favorite bad luck snowballs to come around in recent years. For more information, read our review.
• She Never Died (2019) — Feminine rage and immortals who hunt bad people.
• Pretty Lethal (2026) — Passing this film over because there are ballerinas on the poster, is a mistake. Plus, Uma Thurman is in it.
