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Review: Satanic cults, geysers of blood a numbing bore in 'They Will Kill You'

Adam Graham, The Detroit News on

Published in Entertainment News

In "They Will Kill You," Zazie Beetz fights off a murderous cult of immortal Satan worshippers, and that's nothing compared to the struggle to stay even the least bit invested in what's happening on screen.

This is one of those unholy genre mashups that tries everything — action! comedy! horror! — and succeeds with nothing. Outside of 14-year-old boys who have never seen a Tarantino film, most will find it a derivative bore.

Beetz plays Asia Reaves, who, in the opening scene, is trying to run away with her little sister Maria to escape the clutches of their abusive father. She shoots him but does not kill him, and is sent away to prison for 10 years.

Upon getting out, she heads to the Virgil, a swanky old-school Manhattan hotel, to work as a live-in maid. She is greeted there by Lilith (Patricia Arquette), who shows her around and takes her to her quarters, where not long after Asia falls asleep, she's attacked by a group of mask-wearing assailants.

When she handily kills them all — chopping off heads and limbs which shoot geysers of blood into the air — the victims regenerate. So you can now add supernatural into the list of genres with which co-writer and director Kirill Sokolov is playing.

Turns out these assailants are part of a Satan-worshipping cult and they've been granted eternal life, which they use to hunt new blood inside the confines of the hotel, which they never leave. Paterson Joseph plays Lilith's husband, who lets Asia in on the hotel's secrets and tries to help her escape its hellish confines.

"Kill Bill" is Sokolov's most obvious influence, although he's also playing with bits of "Hotel Artemis," "Eyes Wide Shut" and Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" movies. (The extended sequence with a disembodied eyeball is straight out of the Raimi playbook.) But his pastiche comes off as empty, because he never gives his characters any more than surface-level depth, even after introducing them with chapter stops and title cards which promise more introspection than he bothers to deliver.

"Industry's" Myha'la plays the grown-up version of Asia's sister, who works at the Virgil and is the reason Asia shows up there. They team up to fight the undead satanists, although the action and the bloodletting are painfully repetitive. If you've seen one body get split in half by a flaming ax, you've seen them all.

Sokolov — his way with titles extends to his 2018 film, "Why Don't You Just Die!" — plays with wide angles and super slow-mo techniques like he's trying out every trick in the "How to Direct With Style" manual. But what he's missing is lore and character, which is what is needed to care about everything else that is happening. Without it, "They Will Kill You" is already dead.

 

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'THEY WILL KILL YOU'

Grade: D

MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence, gore, language and brief sexual content/nudity)

Running time: 1:34

How to watch: In theaters March 27

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©2026 The Detroit News. Visit detroitnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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