Director – Moritz Mohr, Screenplay – Arend Remmers & Tyler Burton Smith, Screen Story – Moritz Mohr & Arend Remmers, Based on the Short Film Boys Kills World (2021) Written by Moritz Mohr & Arend Remmers, Producers – Zainab Azizi, Wayne Fitzjohn, Dan Kagan, Alex Lebovici, Roy Lee, Stuart Manashil, Sam Raimi & Simon Swart, Photography – Peter Matjasko, Music – Ludvig Forssell, Songs – El Michels Affair, Visual Effects – Chocolate Tribe (Supervisor – Ron van de Bragt), Edi Effeti Digitali Italiana (Supervisor – Gaia Bussolati), Fractal Pictures (Supervisor – Vishrut Manseta), Hello There Games & Stargate Studios Colombia (Supervisors – Freddy Rodriguez Romero & Daniel Saravia), Special Effects Supervisor – Doug Hardy, Prosthetics Designer – Gerald Sutherland, Production Design – Mike Berg, Action & Fight Design – Dawid Szatarski. Production Company – Nthibah Pictures/Vertigo Entertainment/Hammerstone Studios.
Cast
Bill Skarsgård (Boy), H. Jon Benjamin (Voice of Boy), Jessica Rothe (June27), Michelle Dockery (Melanie Van Der Koy), Brett Gelman (Guido Van Der Koy), Yayan Ruhian (Shaman), Sharlto Copley (Glen Van Der Koy), Cameron Crovetti & Nicholas Crovetti (Young Boy), Famke Janssen (Hilda Van Der Koy), Andrew Koi (Basho), Isaiah Mustafa (Benny), Quinn Copeland (Mina), Jane De Wet (Anna the Flower Girl)
Plot
Hilda Van Der Koy and her family maintain a brutal dictatorship over the city where they annually conduct The Culling in which they eliminate enemies and the socially worthless. The deafmute Boy has witnessed his mother killed during The Culling. He has been taken in by the shaman who determines to make Boy forget about his childhood and raises him to be an incredibly tough fighter. Boy seethes with vengeance against Hilda. Back in the city, he witnesses a slaughter of civilians by members of the Van Der Koy family. He sneaks into the Van Der Koy mansion where he joins forces with two rebels, all the while accompanied by a young girl imaginary companion. With his incredible fighting prowess, Boy proceeds to eliminate his way through the family and their hired muscle.
Boy Kills World was a directorial debut for German director Moritz Mohr. It is being reported that the film is based on a short film, but what becomes apparent is that this was Boy Kills World (2021), a proof-of-concept film that Mohr made to attract funding. The full-length film comes produced by some impressive names including Sam Raimi and Roy Lee, head of Vertigo Entertainment. Mohr conceived the film with Arend Remmers, a regular German screenwriter who also conceived the not dissimilar and quite hilarious action meta-fiction that was Snowflake (2017).
Boy Kills World is a film so mind-bogglingly different that I am left scratching my head trying to figure out how to label it. It belongs here on the site but the question is where. There is a city led by a totalitarian government that holds public executions on television, while Jessica Rothe fights while wearing a motorcycle helmet that has digital displays on the visor, although there is no indication we are in a future scenario. There is a great deal of bloodshed but you cannot call this a horror film. There is a level of meta-fiction and an Imaginary Companion but it is no easy fit as a fantasy film.
If there is a near comparison you could make, it might be to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), even though both are stylistically very different films – Boy Kills World is sort of more like a less fantastical, realistically grounded version of Scott Pilgrim maybe. Although the parody of the Action Film and over-the-top violence far more resembles that of the Clive Owen starring action comedy Shoot ‘Em Up (2007).
Bill Skarsgård as Boy
The action scenes are completely deranged. They go to excess and are like the imaginings of a mad fiend. Moritz Mohr and fight choreographer Dawid Szatarski go well over-the-top, pushing the action to an unreal level of ultra-violence, leaving the screen awash with gore. It is rather entertaining watching Bill Skarsgård massacre his way through the Van Der Koy complex, conducting bizarre acrobatic moves, tearing arms off and beating people with them and the climactic showdown where opponents progressively slash each other’s tendons and arteries. In one hilarious sequence, we get Bill Skarsgård eliminating a kitchen full of chefs armed only with a cheese grater.
At the same time, Boy Kills World is constantly puncturing all manner of clichés. The film gets a great deal of amusement out of Boy’s dialogue all being narrated in the dull, urgent monotone of a tough guy, which the film tells us is taken from the Street Fighter (1987) videogame. The early sections offer a parody of the training montage and Eastern guru. Bill Skarsgård even gets a young girl imaginary companion and the dialogues with her are hilariously meta – just throwaway lines like where the deafmute Skarsgård comments “I’ve never heard a man cry” whereupon the sound effects accompanying imagining of such as tropical birds screeching. And then things are thrown on their head in an outlandish Conceptual Reversal Twist at the end – it is bizarrely far-fetched but then fits perfectly with the film’s tone.
All the performances are wildly over-the-top. Perhaps no-one gets to go loose more entertainingly than Sharlto Copley who has a positively side-splitting scene where he attempts to give a public speech that accidentally turns into a massacre in the street, or where he is pleading for his life while having an anvil held over his head. Bill Skarsgård has been a fairly quiet and anonymous performer up to this point but comes to the fore in a big way with his entirely silent performance, not to mention looks incredibly buffed when he takes his shirt off.
