How do you justify tying your survival, health, and prosperity directly to someone else’s sacrifice?
That question sits at the center of the new film They Will Kill You, starring Zazie Beetz. It’s a blunt question the film asks with a wink, but don’t be deceived. It is not interested in letting you off the hook. It wants an answer. This is not just a horror film built around a supernatural bargain with a demon. It is a story about choice and its immediate and cumulative cost, along with consequences we would rather not examine too closely.
There is also a subtle mythological layer beneath all of this, one that echoes The Divine Comedy without calling attention to itself, framing this bargain as part of a larger moral system operating within The Virgil.
The film introduces the simple premise of trading one life for another. It feels familiar at first, like a story you already understand. Yet the longer you sit with it, the more that simplicity begins to fall apart. What initially looks like a clean transaction reveals itself to be far more complicated, pushing beyond a simple question of right and wrong.
This film has problems, but what it gets right, it really gets right.
Read the review below or watch it on YouTube:
The Setup
The story follows Asia, a woman trying to rebuild her life after prison by searching for her missing younger sister, Maria. She eventually tracks her to The Virgil, a wealthy New York residence where people seem to fall out of society and disappear. Asia is determined to find Maria and reclaim their relationship, but things are not as they seem, and her sister is no longer the little girl she left behind.
It’s an emotional premise set against an absurd, heightened backdrop. The film leans into a campy, over-the-top tone that blends action and horror through exaggerated, highly stylized violence that often defies physics while keeping the story’s internal logic deliberately loose. You will inevitably find yourself asking practical questions about how this place functions and how the system within The Virgil sustains itself, but those questions are almost beside the point. The film raises them, then moves on without answering them.
At times, They Will Kill You is intentionally corny and action packed, as if it exists somewhere between The Heretic, Tropic Thunder, and Kill Bill. The heightened action and campy practical effects make it feel a lot closer to older horror traditions, with these bright bursts of stylized blood and body horror that push against the boundaries of modern genre expectations.
The Virgil, as an environment, embraces an ornate Art Deco aesthetic that feels frozen in time. That stylization gives you just enough distance from the world on screen to question what you are seeing, rather than simply reacting to it.
The Experience
This is not a film that depends on star power to carry its weight. I made a conscious decision not to look up the cast, director, or writer. Their identities have no bearing on how I interpreted this story, and that distance allows you to meet the film on its own terms.
At first glance, it plays like a heightened, slightly campy horror film from the 1980s or 1990s. There is strong action, rising tension, and a clear sense of danger tied to rules that seem easy to understand. That accessibility invites you to settle in and assume you know where the story is headed … but you don’t. Or at least, not in the way you expect.
Instead of expanding outward into a detailed mythology, the film turns inward. It becomes less interested in explaining to us how this world works and more focused on Asia’s experience understanding and moving through it. Even the name “The Virgil” feels like a mythological clue the film offers without explanation, while hinting at a deeper structure that’s implied but never defined. That choice gives the film its identity, even as it leaves parts of the worldbuilding incomplete.
The Cost
What stays with you after the film ends is not the action or the mechanics of the world, even if they remain some of the film’s biggest flaws. Instead, what lingers is the film’s central question: Who are you willing to continuously sacrifice for your own survival?
The question carries weight because it touches something deeply human inside of us. It also introduces the bargain with the demon as a metaphor for the choices we make every day as we chase success or grasp onto the fraying edges of our own survival. Success requires tradeoffs. What are you willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals? What does the cost-benefit analysis actually look like when tradeoffs are rarely neutral? Someone benefits, and someone pays the price.
The film never makes it clear whether one sacrifice is enough or if The Virgil’s system demands additional sacrifices from each resident over time. What is clear is that the cost for immortality doesn’t feel finite and additional payments are required.
That’s what They Will Kill You is all about. It dresses that idea up in a campy horror action comedy with a black girl boss as the central character, and that choice feels intentional because Asia is not just set up as the hero of the story, she’s also the sacrifice.
The film deepens that idea through characters who have lived with this system for years. Over time, their justifications begin to erode. What once felt acceptable becomes harder to ignore. This is about making a choice and the cost of living with it over time.
Ray, the old man who tries to help Asia, makes that shift explicit. When the system operating within The Virgil first began, the sacrifices were “bad people” who the residents could justify choosing. As time passed, those bad people became harder for the residents to find. So, they began taking anyone they could lure into the building. They stopped asking who these people were and what their choice to sacrifice these people meant. Their decisions did not stay neutral. Instead, their choices moved the residents from good, to morally gray, to something much darker.
That transition and the cost of the choices that we make over time is the part that we rarely talk about. The residents of the Virgil begin to feel like an extension of our own private dirty little secrets. We justify our choices, telling ourselves what we gained was worth it. We avoid looking too closely at who paid the price, because if we did look, we would have to confront what our choices actually say about us.
The Hidden Structure
There is another layer the film never states directly, but builds into its structure. The building is called the Virgil, which immediately evokes The Divine Comedy. In that story, Virgil leads Dante through Hell, helping him to understand its structure and meaning.
The parallels begin to emerge once you notice them. The Virgil is organized into nine floors, loosely reflecting the nine circles of Hell. The film never maps this structure out clearly, but it provides enough clues to recognize the pattern. Moments like Asia having to pass through the 2nd floor’s so-called “F*ck Floor,” is an obvious nod to Dante’s progression from the first level into the second level, which is based on lust.
Asia’s journey mirrors Dante’s in this structure. Like him, she can’t escape from any single level. The exits are all sealed, the windows reinforced, and there is no way out from any individual floor. The only way out is to move through the building, floor by floor, until she reaches the roof and finds a way down the outside.
This aligns closely with Dante’s journey. In The Divine Comedy, the way out of Hell is not to defeat it, but to understand it and move through it. That is where Ray’s role becomes essential because he lives within the system. Like Virgil helping Dante, Ray chooses to help Asia. However, while he can guide her, he can’t save her. She’s got to do that for herself.
Even the hierarchy within the building reflects Hell’s structure. Lily controls access and movement between floors, acting as Asia’s gatekeeper within the system. At the center of it all is the bargain with the demon, and the residents are the physical force pushing and pulling Asia toward the heart of the building and her moment of sacrifice.
The movie never explains this outright. It trusts you to get it, or not. If you are looking for a fully explained mythology, the film will leave you feeling incomplete.
What Works (And Doesn’t)
What works best in They Will Kill You is the film’s willingness to sit in its own discomfort. The film knows what it is, and it doesn’t worry about presenting itself as a polished piece of cinematic art. Instead, the movies shrugs off any need to explain itself and lets its ideas linger with you long after it ends.
The campy tone reinforces that choice, keeping the film from taking itself too seriously and removes any pressure to explain its purpose or its mythological undercurrents. The exaggerated action and practical effects are as low budget as they come, but that simplicity works in the film’s favor. It feels like a return to basics.
At the same time, the internal logic is inconsistent, and that inconsistency is amplified by the story’s obvious disinterest in explaining itself. This creates gaps in how the system operates and how the world functions. They can easily pull you out of the experience, especially when you start asking some of the larger logistical questions that the film has no intention of answering. In those moments, you have to decide whether to stay in the story or let those gaps pull you out of it.
Some of the biggest issues come from the exaggerated action, which occasionally stretches the film’s credibility too far. That creates additional problems during a few of the scenes that have some uneven performances. Even in a dark comedy that leans into absurdity, the illusion breaks if you start to feel the actors becoming aware of the story, and there are a few moments when it feels a little too obvious.
While none of these issues ruin the film because the tone makes it obvious that the film is a stylized, if not somewhat wacky, modern horror that is meant to get you thinking about some of the deeper, philosophical issues.
Is it Worth it?
So, with all of the good and bad in this film, is They Will Kill You ticket worthy? It really depends on what you want out of a movie. If you are able to roll with this film’s punches and enjoy it for the campy horror film that it is, I think it’s worth seeing. However, this movie is not for everyone. Most people are likely to feel vaguely satisfied with the movie as a whole, but while the film does do some interesting things, it doesn’t stick the landing. If you don’t like horror and you prefer tightly constructed worlds with clear rules, this film is likely to fall short for you.
Let me know what you think of They Will Kill You? Did it work for you? Is it an interesting enough concept to get you into the theater or will you be waiting for it to hit streaming? Let me know in the comments.
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