‘Boy Kills World’ (2023) review – Vengeance abound in thrilling but flawed fever dream

If Deaf representation in cinema has shifted from Oscar winner CODA and Riz Ahmed helmed Sound of Metal framing music as the antithesis to our lived experience, to a string of stories starring vengeful Deaf antiheroes in the Marvel series Echo and – now – ultra-violent movie Boy Kills World (starring Bill Skarsgård), then I am perfectly happy with that.

Hear me out (pun somewhat intended), but when we’re still having to contend with the misinformed, binary view that disability is either an infallible superpower or a devastating ‘affliction’ to be pitied, stories featuring Deaf protagonists with morally questionable stances are refreshing and subversive. It feels daring – fun – and I’d use the same terms to describe this thrilling action fever dream, all about a Boy (Skarsgård) trained by a mysterious shaman (Yayan Ruhian) to take down a paranoid totalitarian matriarch responsible for the murder of his family.

It’s suggested this traumatic event is responsible for the Boy being “deaf and mute” – not words I’d use to describe him, mind, though it’s a tricky one to unpack. The phrase is considered alongside “hearing impaired” and “deaf and dumb” to be offensive to Deaf people, with America’s National Association for the Deaf (NAD) writing it’s “technically inaccurate” (deaf people “generally have functioning vocal chords) and that they’re not “truly mute” because they use other methods of communication as an alternative to or in addition to communicating orally. Indeed, in Boy’s case, it’s made clear that he knows sign language in order to communicate with the shaman – it’s just a shame that this is only shown in two brief scenes, and his use of sign language isn’t extended to other interactions.

Instead – and this is to Skarsgård’s credit – Boy seems to wing it through wide-eyed non-verbal communication, the IT actor evidently recycling his expressive skills honed from his performance as Pennywise. In many instances, a single look conveys a lot, and other characters managing to understand Boy because of that is just about believable, but there are also moments – such as when Boy receives a pep talk from fellow resistance member Basho (Andrew Koji) – where you have to wonder how they succeeded in guessing what Boy was thinking.

We only know because of narration from H. Jon Benjamin (Bob’s Burgers), who repeatedly reminds us of Boy being “shaped for a single purpose” (to kill the aforementioned matriarch, Hilda Van Der Koy – an all too brief, but emotionally layered performance from X Men actress Famke Janssen) and offers a number of dictionary definitions to describe his current state of mind and internal monologue, which is often liminal and altering between hallucinations and reality (Jasen Nannini oversees some wonderfully imaginative and trippy visual and special effects in this respect), with regular interjections from the vision of his dead sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland). The voice, we’re told, is taken from an arcade game character he came across when he was younger.

It’s ridiculously easy to compare Boy Kills World to Deadpool, what with the main character having an inner voice; the showcasing of excessive gore, dismemberment and pratfalls; and the dogged pursuit of a big bad to exact revenge, but there is a balanced amount of flaws and triumphs which set it apart from the Ryan Reynolds favourite when it comes to using similar comedic devices. There’s little self-awareness – or fourth wall break – around its own writing, which in early scenes is jarring and on-the-nose in its attempt to be juvenile and humorous. He pronounces when he’s spotted a dead guy in the boot, declares he is a “super clean and super deadly assassin (he really isn’t) and after a bad guy is shot, they shout “you shot me”, in case you weren’t already aware.

But make no mistake, Boy Kills World is much more violent than Deadpool. All I need to tell you is that one messy fight scene in this Sam Raimi co-produced film involves a cheese grater to understand the extent to which Dawid Szatarski’s action and fight design is more wince-inducing than Marvel’s hit franchise. It does borrow from Deadpool’s wacky mid-fight pauses, though – in the form of a tactical bite of a macaron while somersaulting – to great success.

Fans of The Boys will, undoubtedly, make comparisons too, not least because Cameron Corvetti (Ryan Butcher in the Amazon Prime Video series) shares the role of the younger Boy with his twin brother Nicholas, but also Basho with his Cockney accent is similar to Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher – lines about goats and molluscs (that’s all I can say here without the inclusion of expletives) are utterly ridiculous.

Yet arguably the most hilarious element of this film is Benny (Isaiah Mustafa), a bearded resistance member whose character is rendered completely irrelevant for the simple reason that Boy can’t lipread him. He never utters a single coherent sentence – instead throwing out outlandish and nonsensical sentences like “pick pod briefcase” – meaning that when him and Basho plot to infiltrate a dinner where members of the family dynasty are in attendance, Boy’s mental imagery of exactly what’s about to unfold are incredibly improbable (apparently Boy thinks a robot’s involved in the plan? It really isn’t). Even when this joke is done countless times over the 110-minute runtime, and it throws up a continuity error when Boy can lipread bearded baddie Gideon (Stranger Things’ Brett Gelman) just fine, it still manages to produce a laugh every time due to the sheer unpredictability of what Benny has “said”. It’s probably the wildest and most intelligent depiction of the guesswork behind lipreading I’ve seen in a long time.

Note what I say about continuity errors, as although the incongruence of understanding bearded men is just about permissible as an unfortunate oversight from script writers Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers (they’re credited as the writers of the screenplay – with co-producer Alex Lebovici saying Burton Smith was brought in to “polish the dialogue and refine the structure” – while Remmers and director Moritz Mohr are noted as being behind the screen story) the way in which key details are only really given the significance required to be impactful long after they’ve been introduced, is a proper disappointment.

The very first minute of the film rushes through Van Der Koy killing Boy’s family in a regular event known as ‘The Culling’ to assert authority, but all the emotional weight which would emphasise the devastation this places on our protagonist is drip fed through flashbacks and the aforementioned hallucinations involving Mina. It’s understandable why he would be closest to the family member of a similar age to him, but I did wonder why, in the first instance, we never really saw his relationship with his mother explored to the same extent (besides her having an affinity for guns).

From one family to another, this rather ‘retrospective’ storytelling and exposition also extends to finding out the family dynamics of team Van Der Koy. Even on the first draft of this paragraph, I still assumed shouty, suited Glen (Sharlton Copley) was Hilda’s husband and not that of the PR-obsessed Melanie (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery), with sibling Gideon and a helmet-wearing fighter named June27 (Jessica Rothe) completing the villainous line-up. It’s difficult picking up names at first, but thankfully we get a refresher during the aforementioned plan by Basho and Benny. One wonders if this narrative approach is supposed to conjure up intrigue, but in fact it’s a lot more jarring than that.

I also have to mention a certain plot point – albeit very briefly and with minimal detail so as to avoid spoilers – which I legitimately did not see coming, and left me in a sense of anticipation around the unpredictability (we end up feeling as disorientated as Boy himself), but it still throws the plot into some disarray in twisting the established details beforehand. It somewhat justifies the backwards plot progression, but in other areas it undermines and unearths plot holes. For those in the know, I’ll simply say the main one pertains to Boy and Mina’s hobby of throwing a certain offensive hand gesture at a certain object. Everything else is revised and reframed in light of that one specific plot point, except for this. No answer is given, and suggests the script could have done with being looked over a few more times.

What’s more, the growing interactions between Mina and Boy increasingly suggest that the former is a voice of reason and moral pushback against her sibling’s obsessive warpath. She’d much rather dress up as a butterfly or devour macarons instead of watching a killing spree. In fact, after one fight sequence towards the end of the film, she retreats as if horrified at how warped Boy has become, questioning whether her brother really has to kill absolutely everybody.

All signs point to Boy eventually seeing sense and considering a more merciful approach (what with all the talk of his “single purpose”, you’re also made to wonder what is next for our protagonist if/when his sole mission is complete), but that never comes to fruition, rendered redundant due to the plot twist. It’s one thing said twist leaving us intrigued and unsure what to expect; but it’s another not delivering on a pretty reasonable expectation held by the audience due to hints which get more overt over time.

Now, normally, my reviews of Deaf films are a lot easier to rate, because the protagonist’s deafness or links to the Deaf community form a pretty integral part of the plot. In Boy Kills World, it really isn’t, and I’m not completely disappointed in the creative team for not making it more of a focal point – sometimes it’s just pleasant having representation where the story doesn’t make a big song or dance (or perhaps, in this case, fight sequence) about it. With that being said, though, the writers, without question, missed a few easy solutions, such as avoiding describing Boy as “deaf and mute” by having more than two uses of sign language throughout, as pointed out in a previous paragraph.

And so I’m more inclined to review this film as a standard action movie, and for all its imperfections, I still really enjoyed watching it for its moments of comedic genius, original fight scenes (one area in which Mohr’s swooping and rapid direction is thrilling, another being in the smooth transitions between Cameron/Nicholas Corvetti and Skarsgård) and for being another intriguing vengeance plot. I suspect you haven’t really seen anything like this before.

★★★

Boy Kills World is in UK and Irish cinemas – including Vue, Odeon and Cineworld – now. It is not available currently on any streaming platforms.

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Images: Signature Entertainment.