Zazie Beetz & Myha’la in Horror Comedy

At the end of it all, a flabbergasted detective asks a survivor what’s just occurred. The victim, battered and exhausted and covered in blood, grunts out just two words: “Rich people.”

That’s about the extent of the social commentary on offer from They Will Kill You, a new action-horror-comedy set in a Manhattan luxury building whose Satan-worshipping tenants engage in ritualistic killings of their mostly poor and marginalized staff. But it’s all the excuse writer-director Kirill Sokolov (Why Don’t You Just Die!) and his co-writer Alex Litvak need to unleash great big arterial sprays with gonzo style, to enjoyably giddy, if ultimately insubstantial, effect.

Arriving just one week after Ready or Not 2: Here I Come hit theaters — and having first debuted at SXSW just a few days after Ready or Not 2: Here I Come did — They Will Kill You will inevitably draw comparisons. It’s impossible to argue they aren’t fair.

Both films are about ordinary women brought into a tightly guarded enclave of the one percent, where they’re to be hunted for sacrifice by entitled sociopaths who’ve struck a literal deal with the Devil. Both films saddle their heroines with estranged younger sisters who harbor lingering resentment about having been abandoned by their big sisters in their youth, but now must make up with them in order to survive. Both films devolve into frenetic yet stylish melees deploying all manner of unusual weaponry before, finally, confronting the supernatural head-on.

But any assumption that they’re the same movie will be wiped out the moment the satin-cloaked Satanists of They Will Kill You corner Asia (Zazie Beetz), the newest maid at the exclusive Virgil apartments, in a closet — only for her to come out literally swinging with a sword, slicing one of their heads clean off to uncork the first of what will be many, many geysers of blood to come.

Asia, we learn through one of several flashbacks, is no oblivious victim but an “avenger,” as her boss (Patricia Arquette‘s Lily) puts it, with an irritated sigh suggesting she isn’t the first. Asia has come here under false pretenses with the intention of rescuing her sister, Maria (Myha’la), another recently hired maid. She’s thus armed to the teeth with blades and guns and ammo, though perhaps nothing is deadlier than her fighting spirit, honed over years of prison brawls. The residents of the Virgil, for their part, are more than ready to defend what’s theirs, with one major supernatural asset up their capacious sleeves that gives them the upper hand.

The simplicity of the plot — the only way out is a fire escape at the top of the building, forcing Asia to fight her way up its nine floors, á la The Raid: Redemption or Dredd — gives Sokolov a relatively blank canvas across which to splatter a grand and gory pastiche of seemingly everything he has ever found cool, from video games to animé to John Wick to Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino. If he’s yet to coalesce all those influences into his own distinctive style, he wields them with gleeful enthusiasm. He dials the violence up to Looney Tunes silliness while Beetz infuses it all with an effortless cool, giving Asia an athleticism that makes her a pleasure to watch and a defiance that makes her a joy to root for.

Asia never swings an axe when she can swing a flaming axe so that she can set her enemies on fire even as she hacks off their limbs. Furniture getting hurled through the air is captured in slow-motion, all the better to admire when it shatters on someone. Gunshots are punctuated by flurries of mattress stuffing falling through the air like snow. And I haven’t even revealed the big twist that accounts for the film’s most eye-poppingly gruesome sights; those, I’ll leave you to goggle at in the theater for yourself.

But even with that endless appetite for mayhem — and even with a trim 94-minute run time — there’s a point at which They Will Kill You starts to leave intriguing ideas on the table in favor of repeating itself. Take the layout of the building. We’re told each floor is themed after a different deadly sin, but aside from a brief glimpse of a writhing orgy on the “fuck floor” (Lust, obviously) and a set piece in an empty kitchen (Gluttony, presumably), we don’t get to see any of the others. Instead, we spend much of that time crawling around dark underground tunnels and climbing up nondescript shafts. It seems a missed opportunity to set the Virgil apart from any of a million hallways we’ve seen action stars punch their way through before.

Then there are the characters. They Will Kill You barely bothers fleshing out its robed and masked masses of villains; the ones played by Heather Graham and Tom Felton are distinguishable only because they’re played by Heather Graham and Tom Felton. But it has not much more interest in key characters like Maria, whose motives shift with the needs of the plot. Or Lily and her husband Roy (Paterson Joseph), about whom I could tell you almost nothing beyond that Arquette seems to have decided halfway through the shoot to adopt a “local newscaster on St. Paddy’s day”-level Irish accent, and Joseph to pick up a gently Southern one.

Even its haves-versus-have-nots posturing turns out to be less about exploring social injustice than allowing us to root for ultra-violence guilt-free, secure in the knowledge that these rich actually are not like the rest of us because they are much, much, much worse.

But perhaps it’s for the best. For all the weapons in Asia’s arsenal, thoughtfulness or emotionality or complexity are nowhere among them. They Will Kill You is simply not equipped to serve up a nuanced exploration of class division, or a poignant drama of sisterly devotion, or what have you. What it is armed for is violence — lots and lots and lots of violence, so brutally nasty it comes all the way back around to childishly funny. That, it is happy to dish out in spades, with enough gusto to sate even the most bloodthirsty filmgoer.