Levelling Up

Director Kirill Sokolov on his unhinged action-horror-comedy They Will Kill You

- MATT MAYTUM

IF YOU KNOW anything about the wild premise of They Will Kill You - in which a woman (Zazie Beetz) takes a job as a maid in an exclusive Manhattan high-rise, only to discover it's a temple to Satan and she'll be its latest human sacrifice if she doesn't fight her way out - it will come as a surprise to learn that it's based on a true story. Sort of. Director and co-writer Kirill Sokolov tells Red Alert that the kernel of the idea comes from his own experience.

"My wife and I moved to a different city in Russia and we rented an apartment in a 17-floor, huge building with hundreds of apartments," he recalls. The other residents were a close-knit community all aged over 60, and Sokolov and his wife felt excluded.

"We started to make this running joke that probably this whole building belongs to a cult and at some point they will just come after us and probably sacrifice us.

I started to move furniture and I found a hole in the wall to the next apartment, which was like, 'Oh my God, now it's definitely a cult! They're coming for us!""