They Will Kill You

The Architecture of Blood

There is a particular texture to the violence in Kirill Sokolov’s cinema—a kind of bruised, manic joy that feels less like a horror film and more like a Looney Tunes cartoon directed by a sadist. In his Russian breakout, *Why Don't You Just Die!*, Sokolov confined the chaos to a single apartment, turning domestic resentment into a ballet of splinters and drywall. With his English-language debut, *They Will Kill You*, he trades the Soviet-era flat for a Manhattan high-rise, but the claustrophobia remains, now polished to a high sheen by Hollywood production values. The result is a film that understands the inherent violence of vertical living, where the hierarchy of the classes is quite literally built into the floor plan.



The premise is deceptively simple, echoing the "eat the rich" anxieties of *Ready or Not* but injected with the kinetic adrenaline of *The Raid*. Zazie Beetz plays a woman who accepts a housekeeping position at The Virgil, a monolithic residence that feels like a tomb disguised as luxury. What Sokolov understands, and what elevates this material above standard slasher fare, is the weaponization of space. The camera doesn't just observe the hallways; it careens through them. Sokolov’s lens is restless, often adopting the perspective of a thrown object or a swinging fist. When the violence erupts—and it does, with a grotesque generosity—it is not filmed with the shaky-cam obscurity of modern action, but with a wide-angle clarity that forces us to acknowledge every impact.

The "Satanic cult" trope is often a lazy shorthand in the genre, a way to explain away motivation with hooded robes and chanting. Here, however, the cult is almost indistinguishable from a particularly aggressive co-op board. The horror comes not from the supernatural, but from the terrifying banality of the wealthy tenants, led with icy detachment by Patricia Arquette. They view Beetz’s character not as a person, but as a resource to be consumed—a grim metaphor for the service economy that Sokolov pushes to its bloodiest conclusion. The aesthetic is "splatstick" in its purest form; a sequence involving a flaming bat is framed with such painterly precision that it evokes a twisted sense of awe rather than just disgust.



At the center of this maelstrom is Beetz, who brings a grounded, weary gravity to a role that could have easily been a generic scream queen. The script, co-written by Sokolov and Alex Litvak, makes a crucial decision regarding her agency. She is not a helpless victim discovering her strength; she is a woman with a past, implied to have been hardened by the prison system long before she stepped into The Virgil. This shift in power dynamics transforms the film from a survival horror into a siege thriller. We aren't watching a mouse escape a trap; we are watching a wolf realize it has been locked in with sheep who *think* they are wolves.



If there is a flaw, it is that the film occasionally struggles to balance its satirical bite with its obligation to deliver genre thrills. The third act risks collapsing under the weight of its own body count, threatening to numb the audience with excess. Yet, Sokolov manages to pull it back with moments of pitch-black humor that remind us of the absurdity of it all. *They Will Kill You* serves as a confident, brutal announcement of Sokolov’s arrival in the American market. It is a film that suggests that in the high-stakes real estate of New York City, the only thing more expensive than the rent is the price of your soul—and perhaps, the cleaning bill.