Boy Kills World (2023)

Boy Kills World (2023)

7/10

Starring          

Bill Skarsgård

Jessica Rothe

Michelle Dockery

Brett Gelman

Isaiah Mustafa

 

Directed by Moritz Mohr

 

Boy Kills World is a funny action-comedy film about a boy who is going against the city leaders where he lives. Boy (the main character, who is referred to throughout the movie as Boy) is deaf and mute in this dystopian city. The city is ruled by the Van Der Koy family, and Boy's mother was a rebel in the city. His little sister Mina was also a rebel, and she was to him like his hero. The head of the Van Der Koy family is Hilda, who once a year selects twelve people in the city to participate in something called the culling, where they are killed on live tv. Boy, Mina and his mother were selected at one time. Boy watched his mother and sister killed, but somehow, he survived but was left deaf and mute. He was saved by a Shaman. The Shaman then starts to train Boy in martial arts, giving him hallucinogenic to strengthen his mind and to make him forget his life before this, all this was so that he can be strong enough to enact revenge for his dead mother and sister.

The thing about this movie is not the above intro, but the way it is carried out. The comedy comes up in all the unexpected places, and the character boy communicates with us the viewers, by the voice in his head talking through the movie as it carries on. Mina his sister he hallucinates, as he goes about his life, she is beside him, talking to him and making him complicated.

The acting as you will expect from Bill Skarsgård, who plays Boy is top notch. But concerning the movie surroundings and the idea of the dystopian future, well the movie did not waste too much time working on that. I do not know what the budget of this movie was, but I can tell you much of it did not go into scenery. The movie’s backdrop is very similar to the world we live now, which I think plays into Boy’s engagement with his surroundings when he fights and runs. The whole fight and running, one man against an army reminds you so much of the action movies of the 90s. Where the bad guys are bad shots and the main character is a good one, he never misses, but everyone else does.

The movie’s big talking point is when the movie steers away from everything we know is happening concerning Boy. Who he really is and how he became who he is. The movie has a big twist, which I must be honest did not see coming from the start. The movie plants the same kind of seed you will expect from a revenge film and, like every revenge film there is always some twist, well this one got me unawares, and for that reason alone, I ended up loving the movie the more.