Wheatley's debut feature Down Terrace met with considerable acclaim for its inventive melange of kitchen-sink drama and gangland brutality, and at first Kill List seems to pick up the same thread, presenting traumatised Iraq veteran and family man Jay clashing repeatedly with his wife over the parlous state of their finances. It's composed in an intelligently spliced verite style, somewhere between Shane Meadows and Andrea Arnold, and promises much. When the beleaguered man's former army buddy comes to him with a job offer involving carrying out a series of contract killings, the train is set in motion along a more constricting hitman thriller track, but enough uncertainty lingers to retain interest, through the ambiguity of their sinister employers' motives and Jay's mental unravelling. Sadly and inexplicably, this train is comprehensively derailed in the last reel with the bizarre decision to go all-out Wicker Man. There'll undoubtedly be a future occasion when this director gets all his ideas to gel; unfortunately here the good work is undone by the superposition of too many genre filters.
5/10
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