Schrödinger’s Kill List

BEWARE SPOILERS: We go into every post assuming you’ve already watched the film being discussed.

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Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) is an odd film, at once ultra-violent and even-keeled, confused and focused, quiet and, thanks to Martin Pavey’s expert sound design, deafening. While detail and precision give movies like The Wicker Man (1973) and Häxan (1923) their own special brand of disturbing, in Kill List, it’s the lack of detail, the haziness, the things you can’t figure out that make this film so bizarre and unsettling. Commenting on this weirdness in a sideways sort of way back in 2012, Roger Ebert asked:

Does it matter that nothing in the payoff makes sense? Does it need to? Has the movie jumped the rails and thrown itself into the hands of wild invention? It seems that way.

Ebert goes on to focus on how the craft of the film works to make you accept its senseless conclusion: “so careful is the setup, so convincing the characters, that we don't quite feel we're being toyed with.”

Other critics agree, this movie is weird, slow, and doesn’t make sense. In a review for NPR, Scott Tobias argues, like TV’s Lost (2004-2010), Kill List is full of unresolved mysteries that give off the whiff “of a filmmaker who’s reaching for an ending he hasn’t entirely solved.”

With some exceptions, the majority of critics view Kill List as weird, slow, and senseless, but also very good. Take Jaennette Catsoulis, who says in the New York Times that the film’s “assured style” holds it together “when the plot doglegs into insanity, and the characters follow suit.” Again, the film makes no sense, but it’s so well crafted, as Catsoulis puts it, that “this brutal fever dream refuses to fall apart.” 

But see, we’re different. We thought that same way at first, but now we think it’s a slow, weird movie that makes perfect sense. But also, it makes no sense at all.

Kill List is like that Walt Whitman poem, where he’s all, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Or like that negative capability thing John Keats wrote about that creative writers and literature students bring up to sound smart--basically, the ability to accept uncertainty, doubt, and mystery without subjecting it to reason.

It seems Wheatley feels the same. Here he is in an interview with Complex:

It’s the tenseness and the fear and anxiousness that you feel. ... That’s the movie … that’s the meaning of it. And the ins and outs of whodunit aren’t that interesting at the end of the day. … The actual meaning of these things can exist in several different layers, and coexist.

Kill List is like what those guys said, Whitman and Keats and Wheatley himself, but poets and filmmakers aren’t as fun as quantum physicists.

Erwin Schrödinger, Cat Person

You know about this already, we’re sure, so we won’t bore you with some long, drawn-out explanation. But other people need some context. So we’ll make this quick. And also 100% accurate and definitely not fictionalized for comic effect.

So, Schrödinger was this guy who had a cat and a thick, heavy, soundproof box. One day, he decides to lock this cat inside the box with a radioactive death stick. Then he starts wondering, is it alive? Is it dead from the radioactive death stick? So then he’s about to check the box to find out, but he realizes, as long as he doesn’t open it, he can’t know whether the cat is alive or dead or an immortal supercat because of radiation. So he calls up Albert Einstein, who just wants to know, “Which is it, alive katze? Dead katze? Überkatze?” And Schrödinger replies, “Don’t you understand? All those things are true, as long as I don’t open the box. Why, this box contains multitudes! The negative capability of it!”

And that’s Schrödinger’s theory of how to make a box that can have anything in it. Buy one and never open it.

(If you must have something more “accurate”--and way less fun--here’s Quantum Magazine’s explanation of the real thought experiment, which is a lot more complicated and nuanced.)

Point is, Schrödinger’s Box of Many Things is also a useful way to think about Kill List, as a film in which reality and dream are interchangeable, in which the unobserved detail contains multiple, often contradictory meanings, all of which are true, and none of which are true: Schrödinger’s Kill List.

Hey! That’s the title!

We’re going to look at the same onscreen events in different ways that, at times, will contradict each other. The idea is they’re all valid, and, because the creators were so selective about which information they cut, the film actually encourages you to accept all of them as accurate, even when they contradict each other. And even when the filmmakers disagree. Like that cat Schrödinger killed and didn’t kill at all and also made immortal.

The Post-Traumatic Nightmare

Eight months ago, Jay (Neil Maskell) and Gal (Michael Smiley), both ex-military, worked a disastrous job as mercenaries in Kiev. So disastrous it’s left Jay in a state of post-traumatic stress. The film follows him as his reality becomes so muddled that he can’t tell what’s true from the nightmare in his head.

The film opens with Jay and his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) hosting a tense and hostile dinner party with Gal and his date Fiona (Emma Fryer). During the evening, Gal and Shel convince Jay to take on a new job, Jay and Shel get into a terrible fight in which Jay can hardly contain his violence, and Fiona finds time to carve a symbol on the back of the bathroom mirror and steal a wad of bloody tissues.

Later, after Gal and Fiona leave, the scene lingers with Jay on the jacuzzi ledge for a few beats until sharp whispers of “Wake up!” give way to Jay’s son shaking him awake the next morning. This line repeats itself throughout the film, reinforcing the idea that we’re seeing a distorted version of reality.

When Jay and Gal meet with the Client, Jay signs a blood contract--with his actual blood, after the Client (Struan Rodger) slices open Jay’s and his own hand. As they take out the first two of three targets, “The Priest” and “The Librarian,” Jay’s trauma erupts in ultraviolence that’s frankly hard to watch.

But more disturbing are the targets themselves. They appear to be villains, even though, as Jay notes, the home of the Priest (Gareth Tunley) “don’t look like the house of a major villain, does it?” Gal replies that the Priest is “probably shagging kids.”

And the Librarian (Mark Kempner) has a collection of videos we don’t see, but Jay and Gal are so violently repulsed that we’re left with suspicions of snuff films, rape videos, and child abuse.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what’s on the videos. The point isn’t what the men did or why they’re on this list. The point is the discomfort and horror. Before Jay kills the Priest, he tells him to turn around. The Priest smiles and thanks him, maybe because he’s glad not to look at his coming death. Or maybe he’s thanking Jay for killing him after all he’s done. But the Librarian thanks him too, repeatedly, while Jay brutalizes him with a hammer.

Jay and Gal are so disturbed by the videos that they break from the list to kill the person who filmed them. After that, they get a hotel room, and that night, Jay looks out the window to see, mysteriously, Fiona across the street, all in white, waving to him.

Why? Because you’re watching a nightmare. We’re operating under dream logic. Things don’t always make sense.

When Jay’s hand and blood become infected from the cut made during the signing of the contract, he sees a doctor who refuses to treat the wound, instead offering cryptic advice: “The past is gone. The future is not yet here. There is only ever this moment.” Whatever the doctor is telling Jay, he’s also telling us, the viewers, to let go of prior scenes, to stop trying to predict and analyze, and to let the film simply be.

When Jay and Gal try to leave the unfinished contract, the Client threatens to kill them and their families, telling them to act as “cogs” and finish the job for the sake of something called “Reconstruction”--whatever the hell that is. Again, it doesn’t matter. There’s only this moment, with its ominous lack of detail, the way nightmares are ominous because of what you can’t see, what you can’t understand.

In response, Shel and their son hide out in a cottage while Jay and Gal try to finish the job, staking out the final target, “The MP” (member of Parliament), and discovering he’s part of a cult (let’s call them the “Reconstruction”). They follow the MP to a mysterious ritual, where, after a woman hangs herself and against Gal’s better judgment, Jay opens fire, killing the final target and other Reconstructionists. The climax ensues, with the cultists chasing them, screeching like birds of prey, into a series of tunnels. One of them catches and guts Gal, forcing Jay to kill him out of mercy.

After a whole bunch more insanity, we find Jay again at the ritual site, forced to fight and kill a masked Hunchback. The group crowns him and claps in approval. Bewildered, he steps forward, unmasking the Hunchback to reveal Shel’s bloodied face. She starts to laugh as he removes the sheet covering her back, finding his dead son. The camera pauses on his face--a reminder, “there is only ever this moment”--before the credits roll.

In this interpretation, Kill List moves at the pace of a nightmare, rapidly and unattached to anything tangible. The film gets its power from uncertainty and anxiety, inspired by Wheatley’s and his wife’s (co-writer Amy Jump’s) nightmares and fears, as he mentions in an interview with IndieWire and in the one with Complex referenced above. Wheatley has also described in some of these same interviews, a technique in which he would film scenes on-script, and then again improvised, before cutting both versions together and removing details that would have pinned down definite answers about what went wrong in Kiev, about the relationships among Jay and Shel and Gal, and other questions that remain in the final cut.

In a more controversial version of the above interpretation, Gal isn’t real. Rather, he’s a piece of Jay, a dissociated identity (think Fight Club). As they move through the kill list, Jay, despite and also because of Gal’s presence and his desire to be free of the restraint or conscience Gal represents, slowly succumbs to his own psychopathy. 

It’s true that, according to the interviews we’ve read, this particular interpretation flies in the face of the filmmaker’s, co-writer’s, and actors’ intentions. In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, Michael Smiley even said he and co-star Neil Maskell created detailed character backstories. But bear with us.

There’s this idea in literary theory that basically says whatever an author or artist intended isn’t really important; what matters is what’s in the text (or movie). In fact, the theory goes, an author could be wrong about what their work means. Just because they meant to say something doesn’t mean that’s what they actually said.

We don’t think Wheatley and others who worked on the film are wrong about their work, but we do think there’s real support for this interpretation. Notably, only Jay signs the blood contract. Jay, not Gal, kills each of the targets, becoming more unhinged in the process. And while the Priest and the Librarian thank Jay for their murders, Gal, when Jay is forced to mercy kill him, simply says, “Sorry,” as if he had somehow failed by dying.

If Gal represents Jay’s Jiminy Cricket, then the climactic fight with the Hunchback and its tragic results are symbolic of Jay succumbing to his own darkness, forever lost to his family and them to him.

Paganism for Capitalists 

But there’s at least one more way to read Kill List, in which nothing is a dream. At some point during the World’s Most Uncomfortable Dinner, Fiona mentions that she works in human resources. Gal cuts in to say she’s the “hatchet man. Sorry, hatchet person.” She explains, “if there is a department that is underperforming … I go in and assess the extraneous manpower and de-force accordingly.”

Then, amid the chaos and tension, she carves the back of the mirror and steals the bloody tissues, marking the house, hexing it. The film then follows Jay as the Reconstruction draws him in, tricking him into fulfilling not only the contract, but the rest of the ritual as well. 

When Gal and Jay meet the Client, he cuts Jay’s hand with a knife dipped in some kind of poison before making him sign the contract in blood.

The Priest thanks Jay, not for letting him turn around, but for aiding the Reconstruction. After this, the hex and the poison deepen Jay’s violent tendencies, driving him to madness as he pulverizes the Librarian’s hands, knees, and head.

When Fiona appears outside Jay’s hotel, she’s performing a ritual to keep him under the spell that’s driven him to psychosis. When the doctor refuses to look at Jay’s hand and gives the strange advice, he’s not some random dream weirdo; he’s a member of the Reconstruction. Then the Reconstruction kills Jay and Shel’s cat, enraging him and goading him into their “de-forcing” operation. 

It’s The Wicker Man all over again, “The little old beetle goes ‘round and ‘round. Always the same way, y’see, until it ends up right up tight to the nail. Poor old thing!” Jay is tethered to the Reconstruction in a way that’s beyond his control or comprehension.

The burning question in this interpretation, the question we said doesn’t matter in the other one, is what the Reconstruction is. What they represent.

Outside the dreamscape, that question matters because the film is no longer about Jay’s mental state. It’s about the hex placed on him by this group, and it’s about the group itself.

Fiona’s work in “human resources” hints at an answer. Other hints are the old man’s reference to Reconstruction and the fact that several cult members are in positions of wealth and power. It’s all very hazy, and in an interview with Cinema Scope, Wheatley admits:

The cult is pretty loosely defined. We didn’t do any research, intentionally. … My underlying thinking … comes out of the very little bit of research we did do about sacrifices. … If crops fail, you have to sacrifice something, or someone, and it placates the gods. … So the cult is like a very baseline original religion, and their new rituals are all around money.

So the Reconstruction is Paganism for capitalists in a time of economic recession. We’re not witnessing a dissociation from reality. It’s all very real.

“Ambiguity Is Interesting; Vagueness Is Annoying”

Eric had a poetry professor who once explained the difference between ambiguity and vagueness: “Ambiguity is when unanswered questions are interesting; vagueness is when they’re annoying.”

So what about Kill List?

Kill List contains multitudes, it’s full of negative capability, and there’s a dead cat, just like Schrödinger’s Box of Many Things. It’s also full of unresolved questions, but the possible answers are limited enough that the ambiguity--simply not knowing--gives way to ambivalence--wavering between different, often conflicting ideas. And that’s interesting, not annoying, because it gets you to replay the film in your head, thinking through it as if each idea were true.

Remember the first time you saw Fight Club and realized that the real Brad Pitt was inside Ed Norton all along? Then you went on raving about how it was the best movie ever because it had, like, tricked you or whatever?

Kill List is like that, except you’re not being tricked. The first viewing forces you to sit with uncertainty, doubt, and mystery without subjecting it to reason because it’s so chaotic that you just have to let it wash over you, like a nightmare, without making sense of the details. It’s only on reflection that meaning and connections start to rear their heads. Even then, the things you think you’ve pinned down only exist in outlines because the film denies that level of certainty, insisting upon its ultimate unknowability, not by revealing nothing, but by revealing just enough to leave you unsettled.