They Will Kill You opens with a critical mistake. Asia Reaves (Beetz) is on the run with her little sister Maria, having slipped away from their abusive father. When he finds and corners them, Asia shoots him and, when the cops arrive, flees, abandoning Maria. But their father survived. Asia ends up in prison, and her sister back in a captivity of her own. Her failure haunts her for the difficult decade she spends inside.
Cutting ahead to a stormy present day, Asia arrives at The Virgil, an exclusive New York residential building. She's posing as the new maid in the hopes of finding Maria (Myha'la), now grown and last seen taking a job here. She's prepared for something, but not quite for the truth: This building is a temple to Satan, and its wealthy inhabitants periodically bring in an outsider to sacrifice to their dark lord. They wait until Asia's asleep in her bed to invade her room and violently collect their latest offering.
Sokolov's approach to style is quite heavy-handed, and that comes with its pitfalls.
Only, the cultists weren't quite prepared for her, either. Though she plays the role in this horror film, Asia isn't a final girl in the traditional sense. She is Django Unchained's Django: a concentration of movie star energy so potent that the laws of the genre she's in can't really contain her. She is not merely the victim of violence who must endure and overcome, but (as she's called by another character) an "avenger" who inflicts violence on the evildoers who get in her way. In several scenes, but most effectively in that first attack, a host of masked elites who expect to be horror movie villains suddenly find themselves canon fodder for an action hero.
And Beetz, who can exude cool on screen in a way that feels effortless, embodies her completely. They Will Kill You is at its best when it leans on her for visual, and physical, storytelling. The action itself is inventively choreographed, and Sokolov captures it with the rhythm of animation, progressing from tableau to tableau with striking clarity. With Beetz there to sell it, the film has you in the palm of its hand. Every little beat, whether intended to make you cringe, cheer, or burst out laughing, lands just right.
The rest of the film is much more hit-and-miss. The narrative, as mentioned, is very familiar, and the characters spend too much time talking through it for us to ever forget that completely. The supporting characters leave little impression, aside from Paterson Joseph's sympathetic cultist, less because of how he's written than because Joseph never fails to be interesting. Principal villain Patricia Arquette's disappearing-reappearing Irish accent, likely intended to be playful, ends up distracting.
Sokolov's approach to style is quite heavy-handed, and that comes with its pitfalls. When everything is in perfect sync, the film really sings, but any discordant choice is unlikely to slip by unnoticed. The music choices hurt as often as they help; ambitious camera moves that start off feeling like a jolt to your system see their returns diminish over time. But whenever I felt myself disengaging, something emerged to pull me back in, usually a creative flourish that gave a potentially generic scene a distinct texture. (There's an, erm, extended sight gag partway through that would make Raimi proud.)
There's more than enough in They Will Kill You to justify returning to this particular horror well. It's not as fresh as it clearly hoped to be. But, in these days of brand management, faulting a movie for being overly ambitious is its own form of compliment.
They Will Kill You releases in theaters wide on Friday, March 27.
Release Date
March 27, 2026
Runtime
94 Minutes
Director
Kirill Sokolov
Writers
Kirill Sokolov, Alex Litvak
Producers
Andy Muschietti, Bárbara Muschietti, Dan Kagan, Dana Goldberg, David Ellison, Don Granger
English (US) ·