British writer-director Ben Wheatley's gangland drama centers on hot-tempered Jay (Neill Maskell), who is sensitive and caring with his young son but prone to engage in drawn-out screaming matches with his wife (MyAnna Buring). Jay also happens to be a mob hit-man, but has been lying low after botching an earlier assignment. Now, Jay's more affable partner, Gal (Michael Smiley), comes to him with an assignment from higher-ups to terminate three targets. Jay and Gal handle the first—a priest—with ease, but when it comes to the second, a librarian, the revelation that the man is a pervert sends Jay into a paroxysm of rage, and in a sequence of truly unsettling brutality he tortures the man with a hammer before bashing his head in. Clearly, Jay has become unhinged, and the film veers suddenly into a hallucinatory realm involving primitive fertility rites. But even if the ending is frustratingly opaque, the domestic scenes and murder-for-hire plot are so energetically delivered that Kill List ultimately impresses as a fascinatingly distinctive horror film. Recommended. (F. Swietek)
Kill List
MPI, 95 min., not rated, DVD: $24.98, Blu-ray: $29.98 Volume 27, Issue 6
Kill List
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