They Will Kill You: Hell Hath No Fury | SXSW 2026

We love diving deeper into film releases, so be sure to stay tuned for Lucie Neale's UK review of "They Will Kill You", coming soon! If you're not subscribed to the newsletter, now would be a great time to be...

Action horror is hit or miss. On the one hand, the genres are very close cousins: both are violent, often indulge in creatively gory kills, but they've also got a propensity to overwhelm each other tonally. It can be a tough balancing act keeping the scares from tipping too much into camp, but Kiril Sokolov’s rowdy and riotous third feature, They Will Kill You, threads that needle perfectly, shocking and side-splitting and crazy, and cementing Zazie Beetz as a bona-fide action star.

On a dark and stormy night, a young woman by the name of Elizabeth (Zazie Beetz) answers a help-wanted ad at the Virgil, a storied, illustrious New York high-rise. What she doesn't know is that she’s stumbled into the snare of a cult (Heather Graham, Patricia Arquette, Tom Felton, to name a few) that has been using the building to sacrifice "undesirables” to Satan, gaining youth and power in return. What they don't know is that her name isn't Elizabeth. It's Asia Reeves—an ex-con with a surly disposition, a particular skillset, and a penchant for killing—on a warpath to rescue the sister (Myha’la) whom she abandoned years ago, and she's not leaving without her. Immovable object faces unstoppable force, and nothing will prepare you for the bloodbath.

They Will Kill You sits under the legacy of films like Ready or Not and Evil Dead, but it's wholly original, bathed in non-stop violence. Director Kiril Sokolov is a fanatic for all things that go squick in the night, practical effects so good they make you feel every maim as if it's happening to you. There are some abuses of the flesh in this film that boggle the imagination—bodies cleaved in half, iconic eye-ball physics, pig-headed beat downs. Everything you could want from a weirdo mix of eat-the-rich horrors and samurai movie honor, Sokolov delivers tenfold, with Beetz the perfect avatar to realize it. Beetz yells, swells with anger in a role that demands a lot of her physically, running a marathon of fierce stunt work, and she meets every beat spectacularly. The rest of the cast make good enough pests for her to kill over and over again, Arquette finding dimension in her turn as a cultist troubled by but willing to follow on the choices she has made to survive, while Myha’la holds the line as a feisty sister who doesn't really wanna be saved from the mess she's in.

The major issue I have with the film, though, is that this sort of relentless pace often muddles its story, giving it very little room to flesh itself out outside of its broad strokes and strong character convictions. They Will Kill You has inklings of commentary about how minorities are sacrificed to feed white supremacist institutions, but that feels less like a deliberate narrative aim than it does an incidental feature that the film’s setting and leads enhance through subtext. Morality takes a back seat to personal vendettas (which isn't so much an issue for action films; they're built around passion-fueled mayhem), yet it limits an otherwise exceptional ride because I can't invest as much as I want to. Asia’s quest is so archetypally written when it addresses institutional issues that are much bigger than itself. Nevertheless, Sokolov makes the ride so entertaining that you don't really care if it makes sense. It's a gross-out freakfest, and you're all invited.