The opening act of Ben Wheatley's 2011 film Kill List closes with a fade to black and a whispered voice commanding its protagonist to "wake up". The voice belongs to a child - he's none other than Sam (Harry Simpson), the son of embittered ex-soldier Jay (Neil Maskell) - but is not immediately recognisable as such. It sounds sinister and otherworldly, as though beckoning Jay into another more treacherous reality. As the second act gets underway, Jay does indeed leave the confines of his drab domestic existence and venture into territory that, though intermittently hinted at throughout that first half hour, feels miles removed from it. Come the third act, and Jay is once again urged to wake up, this time by his Swedish-born wife Shel (MyAnna Buring), and heads into a darkness so grotesque and off the beaten path that by the end we don't even seem to occupy the same universe any more. On the surface, Jay does not appear to awaken, but rather treks deeper and deeper into an increasingly troubled dream - what starts out as a drama about marital stresses, one set in a familiar world of suburban skylines and awkward dinner parties, becomes an ultra-violent thriller about uncovering an underground video ring, before finally lurching into full-bore folk horror. We are teased early on that the journey Jay is about to undertake might indicate his repeated failure to get to grips with reality, as he and his long-time business partner Gal (Michael Smiley) set out to meet with their Client (Struan Rodger) and park their vehicle beneath an oddly incongruous rainbow (which, as per Wheatley's commentary, was not planned and got into the picture by total kismet), a playful hint that we are not in Kansas (or Sheffield) any more. And yet, the world that Jay spends the middle half traversing is not exactly Oz, and sleeping is the one thing that we never see him do. While on the road, he spends most of his time in nondescript budget hotels and assumes the life of a wandering insomniac, gazing out of windows, as if hoping that some grand purpose will reveal itself, and seeing only street lights and vacant spaces. Only as the second act is nearing its end, and Jay is about to return to his domestic life with Shel and Sam, does he find something resembling the answer he seeks. He looks outside, and sees a figure on the horizon returning his gaze. For a brief moment, at the height of Jay's restlessness, the mundaneness that dominates the picture, even at its most repugnant, appears to converge with something overtly more fantastical. Jay is not asleep in this moment. Rather, his reality is only just coming into focus.
The script, penned by real husband and wife team Wheatley and Amy Jump, opens with a series of hauntingly authentic arguments between Jay and Shel, and with Sam silently attempting to go about his business in the backdrop. Crucially, one of these arguments establishes that Jay has a tendency (as Gal later defines it) to go "way off list", when he is tasked with buying groceries for an upcoming dinner date but fails to follow the list Shel has supplied and spends £197 on endless wine and copious tins of tuna. The major underlying tension is that Jay has been out of work for eight months, and the family's finances are beginning to feel the strain. Jay is plagued by pains both physical (he insists that the upkeep of the jacuzzi in the garden is a necessary expense for his back, and is informed by Shel - perhaps tellingly - that it is all in his head) and psychological (he is troubled by memories of a previous job in Kiev, the details of which are kept to a strict minimum). He obviously feels a tremendous sense of dissatisfaction in his day to day life, a feeling of being unable to measure up to the chivalric ideals of the King Arthur legends adored by his son. In one scene he attempts to supersede the Arthurian bedtime story requested by Sam with a mythologised retelling of what we presume to be his own experiences as a soldier in Iraq (they take place in a land called "Bagdadistan") - experiences which, he makes clear during the subsequent dinner scene, brought him little in the way of fulfilment or prestige. Despite the harrowing realism with which the family's domestic disarray is presented in the establishing sequences, it would appear that joy and unity has not completely evaporated from their ranks - Jay, Shel and Sam are at their happiest while play-fighting with the toy swords that Jay has also picked up on his haphazard shopping trip, an ostensibly wholesome interaction that foreshadows the film's tragic final outcome.
The world they inhabit is in decline and about to undergo a "reconstruction" - something set in motion with the arrival of Fiona (Emma Fryer), Gal's enigmatic girlfriend, who accompanies him to Jay and Shel's dinner party. During the dinner, it becomes apparent that Jay and Gal have a dark history working as hired hitmen, and tensions arise as to whether Jay's arm will be twisted by Gal and Shel into "getting back on the horse" and accepting a local job in the UK that requires them to bump off a list consisting of three names. Fiona, who is seemingly ignorant to all of this and believes Jay and Gal to be travelling salesmen, introduces herself as working in "human resources". She is described by Gal as a "hatchet person", indicating that there is a parallel to be drawn between her line of work and his own. Fiona elaborates on her role through a barrage of euphemisms: "If there's a department that's underperforming, I go in and assess the extraneous manpower and de-force accordingly." When Jay and Shel deduce that she lays people off, she insists that it isn't personal, and that "there's a bigger picture in the business world...a lot of dirty work to be done." Fiona presents herself as almost hopelessly naive - she rubs the Northern Irish Gal the wrong way with her insinuation that the Troubles was an absurd conflict because Catholics and Protestants are "all the same religion" - but we're given enough evidence that she has entered into Jay's house with a sinister agenda of her own. She repeatedly disappears into the bathroom, where we observe her carving an occult symbol behind the mirror, just as Jay and Shel appear to have found a resolution to their own conflict. Elsewhere, there is a moment where Gal takes Sam aside and jokingly (one would hope) advises him to give tap water a wide berth because "the government puts stuff in it that shrinks your balls". He echoes Jay's concerns about modern suburban life being stifling and emasculating, while evoking the feeling of there being some malevolent and unseen design that is dictating the characters' lives. The horror of Kill List lies in the gradual revelation of this design, and how it conceals itself within the most banal of corners. If Jay spends any portion of the film within a dream, it is surely in the grey prosaicness of that initial act, where he has the luxury of being able to remain in ignorance and in his (relatively) guileless fantasies of attaining legendary heroism. Shel is right about the jacuzzi being all in his head, insofar as in represents submergence in an affluent materialism that seems totally detached from the reality of their situation - the bigger picture in which Fiona is clearly well within her element.
Jay and Gal sign a contract with the Client (who insists on spilling blood from the palm of Jay's hand as part of the process) and set out to hunt down the individuals on their given kill list - the Priest (Gareth Tunley), the Librarian (Mark Kempner) and the MP (James Nickerson). But even then, these contract killings play out in a world that seems oppressively mundane. They note that the home where the Priest resides "doesn't look like house of a major villain", and the Librarian's front walls are adorned deceptively with roses. The most notable things to happen to the men when they're not handling their business involve a credit card declining (an everyday annoyance, but one that Jay fears will brings unnecessary attention their way) and, a notch more disconcertingly, an encounter with an evangelist Christian group who get Jay's goat by breaking out into a singalong of "Onward Christian Soldier" at a hotel dining area. The outside world seems eerily empty and (aside from the Priest's parishioners and some out of focus children Jay observes on a sports field) largely devoid of incidental souls - the Christian group prove intolerable because the dinning room is, as Gal observes, "like a graveyard and yet they still fucking plod up next to us". A mounting feeling that something is off comes in the reactions they get from their quarry as they corner and dispatch them, giving the impression that they are in a bizarre joke that the hitmen are not - the Priest thanks Jay before he shoots him dead, while the Librarian, despite initially insisting that he's been targeted in a case of mistaken identity, tells Jay how honored he is to have met him before being brutally pummelled to death with a hammer (and despite being a contender for the film's most luridly violent sequence, it turns into somewhat of a black comedy number, with the Librarian repeatedly thanking Jay in between drawn-out screams of agony). Meanwhile, Gal tussles with his conscience in ways that Jay does not - despite sharing in Jay's disdain for the Christian group, he is not without religious leanings and has misgivings about the prospect of killing a priest (which he attempts to overcome with the resigned observation that, "At least we're not killing a toddler" - interpreted by some viewers as a hint as to what went down on that fateful job in Kiev). He also grows increasingly uneasy with the relish with which Jay seems to embrace his duties.
Once again, Jay cannot resist the temptation to wander off list, when he catches wind of the kinds of videos the Librarian archives (implied to be of the snuff or pornographic variety) and is so morally repulsed that he forces the Librarian to reveal the whereabouts of the people behind them so that he can personally take them out. But even with Jay actively looking for trouble, we get the inkling that the really dangerous stuff is going on wherever he is not. Although Fiona supposedly dumps Gal in the aftermath of the dinner (he reports waking up to find her gone and a Dear John letter taped to his penis), we learn from Jay's communication with Shel that she has integrated herself into the family home in his absence. In their quieter, more casual conversations while waiting for their targets to appear, Jay and Gal discuss Fiona and dance unknowingly close to her insidious nature - Jay describes her as a "glary-eyed phantom", while Gal calls her a "real demon in bed". Gal confesses that he has been unable to get her out of his head, and it seems that he is not the only one whose mind Fiona has infiltrated. For she is the figure that Jay sees outside of his hotel window, having emerged from the void to return his heedful gaze. Fiona has become a seemingly omnipresent part of Jay's life, capable both of keeping tabs on him from alongside the road and of lying in wait for him back at home. The two of them share a conspiratorial wave that indicates a possible sexual attraction on Jay's part, although whatever adulterous stirrings he might feel prove entirely symbolic. She represents the allure of the unseen world beyond his domain, the apparent purpose for which he has persistently hungered in his day to day life. Her entry into his family's house is not benevolent, but rather points toward the darker meaning of her claims of being in "human resources" with a duty to "assess the extraneous manpower and de-force accordingly". "Hatchet person" would indeed be an accurate description of what she does, for she has identified and earmarked several inessential individuals for death, although not necessarily the same ones on the list that the Client has handed Jay and Gal. This particular list lands a little closer to home.
A figure in Kill List who gets little attention in discussions of the film but who strikes me as an intriguing component of its underlying puzzle is the family cat, who seems at once to represent all parties in the equation. The cat itself goes unnamed and is only briefly seen alive, but is supposedly responsible for the mangled animal carcass the family find in their back garden at the beginning of the second act, before Jay goes off to resume his role as ritual executioner. The animal is a rabbit, but is so badly mutilated (it has effectively been turned inside out), that Jay is only able to identify it as such by dipping his finger in the mass of blood and organs and tasting it (much to Shel's revulsion). The cat is, notably, black, a choice that would appear to align it with the bewitching Fiona and her raven hair - indeed, there is a sleight of hand within the script in which the cat and Fiona become momentarily blurred. When Shel remarks, "She's taking the piss", our immediate thought might be that "she" refers to Fiona. We might even assume a connection between the dead body that turns up on the family's lawn and the occult symbol that Fiona had secretly carved in their bathroom the night before. Jay's response clarifies that they are talking about the cat, although the context, along with the severely mutilated state of the rabbit, primes us for something a little more sinister. There is, in the imagery of Jay cooking the rabbit and devouring it out in his garden (with Shel having objected to his doing so inside the kitchen), the suggestion that a sacrificial offering has been made to Jay, and of a state of separation being required between Jay and his family in order for him to accept it. At the same time, we might detect questions about Jay's real nature in Shel's comments about the cat to Sam: "Daddy thinks the cat brings us little presents...I just think the cat likes killing rabbits." Jay aspires to be a provider for his family, and whatever evil he might commit as a hitman is supposedly being carried out for their benefit, although could it be that he's really in it for the thrill of killing? Later, when Fiona returns to the family home, we hear that she has been bringing Sam presents, a development that seems uncomfortably evocative of the cat's supposed rabbit-killing practices, once again aligning Fiona with the cat and raising questions about her own intentions. Conversely, the cat is also tied up in the innocence of Sam, which is imperilled with Fiona's arrival - according to Shel, Sam has reported having bad dreams about the cat, a hint of the danger facing himself and Shel. Finally, the cat is a hunter who becomes the hunted, foreshadowing Gal's own grisly fate, and the extent to which Jay has been the prey of the external forces all along.
(Spoilers now follow)
The cat is the first of Jay's household to die, when, thrown off by the experience with the video ring, he tries returning home with the contract unfinished and the matter of the MP still outstanding. She might not, however, have been first individual close to Jay to be eliminated by the powers that be. Prior to discovering the cat's lifeless body strung up on his porch, he visits the local clinic, seeking medical attention for the infected cut on his palm, and finds that his regular GP has been replaced by a mysterious gentleman (Damien Thomas) who tells him to live only in the present - the question of what happened to Dr Bapkin is never answered. Jay is already past the point of no return. His entire world has been rearranged in his absence, and he finds that he cannot slip back into the way things were before. Nor do he and Gal have any means of altering their own place within this scheme. When they approach the Client to ask that he release them from the contract, offering to find replacements to complete the job in their stead, they are refused, with the Client informing them that he sees them for what they are: "You're cogs...so keep turning." They are warned that their families will be killed if they do not live up to their duties, but it seems that Jay never had any choice in this matter either. For as they set out to locate the MP and complete the contract, Jay finds himself unwittingly fulfilling a second, unwritten kill list. By the end of the film, he will have lived up to his full potential, but every single being he cares about will have been obliterated on his path to glory.
Jay and Gal journey to the MP's whereabouts, on secluded rural grounds, and find him fronting a gathering of masked pagan cultists carrying out a ritual human sacrifice. Upon becoming aware of the hitmen, the MP openly accepts death, but the other cultists attack and pursue them down an underground tunnel, where Gal is set upon and gutted like a fish (or rather like a rabbit?). Jay is able to fend the cultists off, but Gal is left so brutally eviscerated that Jay is obligated to mercy kill him. The context in which he kills Gal is clear, and yet it proves troubling that Gal's last words, before Jay pulls the trigger, are "Thanks", echoing the dying words of his previous targets and implanting the suggestion that Gal is yet another sacrifice who goes willingly so that Jay may fulfil his purpose. Jay attempts to escape and to reunite with Shel and Sam (who have relocated to a holiday cottage for their safety), but is ultimately captured by the cultists, who force him to duel with one further target, a cloaked "Hunchback", in a knife fight. Jay rises gamely to the challenge and emerges as the victor, having stabbed the Hunchback several times, only for the cloak to be removed and for it to be revealed that his opponent was really Shel with Sam upon her back (recalling their mock battle from the initial act). Sam has already succumbed to his wounds; the bleeding Shel looks Jay in the eyes and collapses into a fit of laughter before she too expires. This laughter is considerably more troubling than Gal's reaction to being put down by Jay, in part because it isn't entirely explicable. It seems improbable that Shel was herself a part of the conspiracy all along, given in a prior scene she was shown putting her own military background into use in an effort to protect Sam from the attacking cultists. And yet she too seems to embrace her own destruction. For his part, Jay responds to the final reveal with more limited emotion - he seems saddened, but not distraught. He'd previously admitted to feeling bad about the cat and was obviously distressed at having to kill Gal, but by the end seems to have lost his ability to be overly appalled by his situation, or indeed by himself. Kill List closes with the cultists removing their masks, revealing that their members include Fiona, the Client and the replacement GP, before the expressionless Jay is crowned as their new leader.
Jay ends up realising his destiny as an AntiChrist figure, or more accurately an AntiArthur figure, an ostensibly ordinary being who becomes king when his capabilities are recognised as excelling that of a regular man. Unlike King Arthur, Jay's actions throughout the film indicate that his reign will probably not be one of benevolence. Jay and Gal had earlier asked the Client how long they had been working for him; the cultists had, it seemed, already marked Jay out as their prospective new leader since long before the depicted events, and had been manipulating him for all of that time. Wheatley's film invites inevitable comparisons with Robin Hardy's highly influential folk horror The Wicker Man (1973), and to the similarly gut-wrenching fate of its protagonist Neil Howie - Jay is valued for his ability to sacrifice others rather than to himself become a sacrifice, but in practice we might be sensing little difference. Jay has spent the narrative in search of a mythical chivalry, which ultimately must stay mythical. He needs, fundamentally, to see himself as a righteous man fighting against the evils of the world, but there is clearly a lot of darkness in his soul with which he struggles to reckon. He indicates during the dinner scene that his dissatisfaction in serving in the Iraq War came from it being difficult to know where he stood in that conflict, and wishes that he could have gone up against the Nazis; he also expresses something resembling admiration for the Nazis when he states that they "had no time for extraneous", raising questions as to whether that yearning stems from him seeing them as clearly-defined villains or as worthy adversaries. He later tries to justify the killing of the Priest to the reluctant Gal on the grounds that the Priest is potentially a child molester, and adds, "As a parent, I'd do them all, even if I weren't getting paid." He insists that he feels no remorse for going off list and killing the video ring because "They were bad people, they should suffer." But by the film's end, he has sacrificed the very values he saw himself as fighting to uphold, in the form of his wife and son, and the question of whether he was truly his family's benefactor or merely a man who revelled in violence has been answered. It is Jay's weakness for violence, we suspect, that has made him so susceptible to the manipulations of the cult; his deficiencies in cutting it as a family man, meanwhile, are precisely why the family themselves needed to be cut loose from the picture.
In those final moments Jay wears a crown, but has he actually transcended the level of the cog the Client had earlier asserted that he was? Or has he in fact been recognised as the ultimate cog, a killing machine that can be programmed to destroy anything so long as he's convinced that it serves a higher purpose? Jay's impassiveness during that closing arrangement could be interpreted two ways - perhaps he's come to terms with that grim reality and is sinking into his new role, or perhaps the hollowness of his supposed victory is not lost on him. There is an uneasy feeling of destiny in this outcome, as if something well-entrenched in Jay's nature was always going to bring him to this point - in one scene, Jay shares with Gal that he used to love looking at fires as a child, foreshadowing the flaming torches that surround him in the final sequence. The prevalence of the inhumane in the everyday is a recurring theme throughout - it is notable that even the innocence of Sam's play pretence reveals a cultural worship of violence that is ingrained from a very young age. He likes to play with swords and other toy weapons and, as acknowledged, it is that seemingly joyful sword fight at the start that emerges as one of the film's most chilling omens on repeat viewings. Sam is clearly upset about the cat, but during its burial is busy firing off his water blaster.
We might be left wondering what the interval with the evangelist Christian group had to do with any of this, aside from revealing Jay in a more restrained mode - he talks about how much he would like to massacre the group, but settles simply for taking their guitar (because Jimi Hendrix they ain't) and giving them a royal chewing out. The group is in some respects an entirely everyday annoyance, strangers who encroach on boundaries and show no consideration for the world outside of their own bubble. They are also an intrusion from from an entirely disparate reality, with their talk of redemption seeming misplaced enough against the sheer mundaneness of the restaurant, let alone the dark path that Jay and Gal are currently on. Jay suggests that they pass on a message to God, that "If you're the kind of people he hangs about with, stay out of my way", while Gal requests, with more feigned cordiality, that if they're "speaking to the big man, put in a word for us". By the end, Jay has become the big man (one that any devoted cultist would be thrilled to be terminated by), and has swapped out his family for the kind of unappealing people a god would hang out with. His own end point was foreshadowed when he told the evangelists' leader, "Your time and place is in a very isolated location, where no one is likely to be for about a hundred fucking years". Jay has wandered extremely far from home, taken up the mantle of a god of a forbidden landscape (without ever ceasing to be a cog), and still seems every bit as alienated as he was when he began.
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