Who exactly are they?
Are they your parents coming home from holiday early before you’ve had a chance to clean up that party? Are they that mythical collective used for rumours, misinformation, the custodians of the dominant ideology you don’t agree with? Are they in authority, a collective of experts, officials, Kafkaesque bureaucrats used to enforce false credibility?
Or are they a bunch of fascist hucksters that are lying directly to your face to do you irreparable harm from their ceaseless corruption?
The title of director Kirill Sokolov’s first English-language feature is unequivocal, no ifs, buts, or maybes, They Will Kill You – fact. In this case they are the super-rich, satanic cult worshiping denizens of the Virgil, an exclusive New York building with solid gold locking mechanisms, baroque demonic carvings on the doors, and the obligatory blood-red pentagram on the roof.
Consequently, the Virgil joins the ranks of those other well-known cinematic shrines to the diabolical, The Dakota in Rosemary’s Baby, Central Park West in Ghostbusters, and Trump Tower in his far-right second term as Dictator in Chief.
Any attempt at keeping even a thinly veiled charade of decorum by the super-rich of the Virgil has been completely obliterated. A decade of the Trumpian, MAGA, Proud Boys politics of hate have fully emboldened them so they can go full Hegseth and pray for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.
Either that or the tangerine POTUS has acted as the most useful of idiots, creating a shitshow of such extremity they can act with complete impunity.
They don bestial bronze masks, a comedic mockery of evil barely used for disguise and their silk robes flow and swirl like Klan robes in The Birth of a Nation. Like with Project 2025, the Virgil’s inhabitants have coerced the poor working class to be willing participants in expounding their authoritarian doctrine, through worshipping their own foul, bloated, polluted Lord of the Flies in the Virgil’s penthouse for the pursuit of immortality.
This is not the rigorous bio-hacking, “Don’t Die” mission followed by Bryan Johnson and the other broligarchs, but it does involve hacking and slicing the necks of others to survive. When they are confronted by Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz in super dexterous form) posing as the new hired help to find her missing sister, their prospects of immortality take a sharp turn towards the finite when all hell breaks loose.
Just for a moment, when Asia arrives bedraggled at the doors of the Virgil in the incessant rain, we’re in Giallo territory, Suspiria country. Strange noises skitter behind her bedroom walls, unseen eyes peer out behind grills and wall cavities, cloaked figures menace our sleeping heroine. Then Asia wakes, the scales fall from her eyes, and the cult knows instinctively their time is up.
If only Trump’s Epstein administration would cotton on as quickly.
Asia certainly reaves her way through the Virgil’s great and the good, like a blood-splattered Tarantino origin story or side quest for Vernita Green from Kill Bill. Machete and axes cleave all and sundry who are foolish enough to stand in her way. They Will Kill You has that level-up arcade-game quality, like Double Dragon or Street Fighter mashed up with the gonzo practical effects of Society and The Evil Dead with the smartest eyeball this side of Alien: Earth.
Sokolov’s film might not have you scrabbling around for coins to press continue but it’s an hour and a half of cathartic wish fulfilment to see Asia become the real they of the title and exact the bloody revenge of the proletariat on the craven elite who no longer hide their contempt for the rest of society.
Asia strikes a blow for the rest of us who have been othered in one manner or another by the far right.
Bloody and beaten, lacerated and cut to shreds but very much alive, Asia is asked by a colleague, “What happened?”
“Rich people” she deadpans back.