Kill List: One of the best films of 2011...that you've probably never heard of...

Easily my runner up for film of the year, behind Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (which should have it's name justifiably changed to Andy Serkis: The Movie), is Ben Wheatley's perplexing masterpiece Kill List, the best chiller to come out of Britain since Christopher Lee set Edward Woodward on fire.

Where the ape movie celebrated old fashioned narrative convention, using state of the art CGI to service a strong story, Kill List gives convention a swift kick in the bollocks and spits in it's anguished face, holding the cards close to it's chest and willfully baffling with it's rapid shifts in tone and genre.

Is it a kitchen sink drama? A treatise on the recession gripped middle class? An actioner? Conspiracy thriller? Head fuck horror flick? Kill List is all of these things and perhaps even more. Like the script's refusal to elaborate on it's protagonist's ill fated Kiev mission, the film gives nothing away but forces you to delve into it's abstract structure and try to unravel it's clandestine intentions.

The plot is simplicity itself, and its undemanding premise is the red herring from which the rest of the film's mystery unravels.
Out of work hitman Jay languishes in his country home, ruminating on his past, arguing with his wife and trying to be a good father to his son. Finding it hard to make ends meet, he joins his best friend Gal on a list of 3 assassination. You don't have to be a professional killer to know that there will be complications along the way. As Jay becomes increasingly unhinged and Gal's reactions to his temper recall their turbulent past together, events build to a surreal, disturbing finale which simply cannot be spoiled.

What makes Kill list so special is it's flagrant disregard for it's audience, it's a film that doesn't seem to care about your attention. At one point, Jay is infuriated as he watches an unseen act of what we can only assume is unspeakable violence unfold on a TV screen, Wheatley refuses to reveal this to anyone but his central character, yet later gives an unbroken shot of a man being beaten a pulp with a claw hammer. It's a macabre game of show and don't tell that keeps you on the raggedy edge right up until that crazy finale, which will divide audiences into the awed and the confused.

There are many reasons to be proud of British cinema, and much cause for shame (sorry Guy Ritchie, but you hurt more people than you helped), but Wheatley's film restores faith in the sheer balls of our homegrown filmmaking. A bold and thought provoking work that needs to be seen by anyone with an appreciation of cinema that extends past the latest Marvel picture.