They Will Kill You Is a Stylish Burst of Horror Chaos

They Will Kill You

★ ★ ★

They Will Kill You is another Hollywood entry in the Satanic cabal subgenre, a lane that seems to be gaining ground in horror. It’s full of hyper-stylized violence that plays like a cross between the Kill Bill films, the Grindhouse double feature and From Dusk Till Dawn. It’s a martial arts, blood spraying battle royale of good versus evil. The cinematic style works well for the action, until it doesn’t.

Zazie Beetz plays Asia Reaves, who just finished a nine-year stint in prison for shooting her deranged father as a teenager to protect her younger sister, Maria (Myha’la). She fled as police arrived, leaving her sister to be placed in foster care. But dad survived and wound up raising Maria anyway. Asia wants to track down Maria and atone for leaving her behind.

Zazie Beetz as Asia Reaves
© 2026 New Line Cinema

Asia gets a job at an apartment building in New York City called The Virgil. The building is Gothic in nature, full of engravings, carvings and symbols that would make just about anyone think twice. Asia probably can’t be too picky.

Upon arriving, she’s met by building manager Lily Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette), who shows her around and leads her to her quarters on the first floor, where all the building staff members reside. The upper floors are for the esteemed tenants. The higher the floor, the more influential.

From the get-go, the apartment building is creepy as hell. Before Asia settles in for the night, she does her best to secure her room, chair jammed against the door handle and all. She’s right to be suspicious: A large man finds his way into her room and attacks her. That’s where the first epic battle kicks off, and I found myself munching popcorn faster than I meant to. It’s violent, fun and feels more like an homage to Quentin Tarantino than an outright rip-off.

Heather Graham as Sharon, Tom Felton as Kevin and Gabe Gabriel as Short Steve
© 2026 New Line Cinema

Then the action stops, and the film dumps a lot of backstory on us. Asia is there because Maria disappeared after getting hired there herself. She wants to either find her sister or extract revenge. And the people she killed in the first action sequence? Their severed limbs reattach and they’re made whole again. The tenants can’t die because of a deal made with the devil. As long as they routinely sacrifice an innocent, they keep living forever. If someone violates the rules of The Virgil, their name is scratched off a living pig’s head chained and suspended on the top floor, and they become mortal again.

Zazie Beetz burning it down
© 2026 New Line Cinema

As the film goes along, the stylized violence starts to feel like spilled blood for the sake of wall decoration, and you start to wonder: Are there any more tricks up its sleeve? From there, it gets a touch tedious, settling for style and gore over substance. To a point, the tongue-in-cheek approach works in the film’s favor, until it makes a haphazard grab for relevance. It’s a last-second nod to the importance of family that barely lands after the bizarre, no-holds-barred ‘beat the devil at his own game’ chaos of the finale.

Patricia Arquette as Lily Woodhouse
© 2026 New Line Cinema

The film certainly takes style cues from Tarantino, and while it never feels like director Kirill Sokolov is ripping him off, it does feel like he’s reaching into someone else’s bag of tricks a little too often.

Even so, it’s a fun film if you don’t think about it too much and can overlook the downtime between action scenes. At times, it feels like it’s trying to be something it’s not, but then it pulls back into its own bizarre territory. Turn your brain off, munch your popcorn and watch the blood paint the walls, if that’s your sort of thing.