A young man, Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), stands outside an apartment, a claw hammer clutched in his left hand, as he waits for the old man inside to open the door.
Right from jump, the audience knows something very bad and very violent is about to happen, that they’re watching a dormant volcano suddenly poised to erupt.
Matvey is at that door because he believes the man inside, Andrey (Vitaliy Khaev), previously raped his daughter Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde), whom Matvey is now dating. Olya has convinced Matvey that her father must die; what she failed to tell him is that Andrey is a powerful, thoroughly corrupt Russian police detective, and that he is damn near impossible to kill.
Why Don’t You Just Die!
4 out of 5 stars.
Rated: Unrated
Run Time: 99 minutes
The magnificent beauty of “What Don’t You Just Die!”—the debut film from writer-director Kirill Sokolov—is that nothing, and no one, is exactly what they seem to be, including the movie itself.
On its surface, Sokolov’s movie is a frenetic blast of absurd and brutal violence populated by moments of surreal visual psychedelia, insane stunts and wire work and a truly skewed narrative perspective.
But deep down, there’s a whole lot more at play.
The film was set to be released in April in 20 theaters across the U.S. by Arrow Films, following a stellar festival track that garnered rave reviews for Sokolov’s originality and execution. That was before COVID-19, of course, before the world paused for a global pandemic, so now “Why Don’t You Just Die!” is being released instead on streaming Video-on-Demand platforms like iTunes and Google Play, and on Blu-Ray disc.
If he’s disappointed by the change in plans, Sokolov doesn’t let it show.
“When we made this movie, I didn’t think really it would be interesting outside of Russia,” he said from Moscow during a recent Skype interview with BVB: Blood Violence and Babes, “and now that it has traveled all the year around the world, when you understand that people from different cultures and different mentality understand your work, and understand the themes you put inside of it, and have fun watching it, it’s an amazing feeling.”
Not surprisingly, Sokolov doesn’t consider “Why Don’t You Just Die!” to be a horror film.
“It’s three stories about revenge, but from three different point of views,” he said. “I was really surprised when the movie started to travel through the genre/horror film festivals because I hadn’t thought about it like a horror. When I wrote it, I thought it’s about, I’m working on a kind of social drama, but I want to make it as fun as possible, so I put a lot of action in it and a lot of this extra violence stuff, but it still has very powerful social curve.”
To say he’s been thrilled by how well his movie has been received would be an understatement.
“What I understood, traveling through the festivals, that the horror and genre movie fans, it’s the best audience you can get,” he said. “These people really love this kind of movie.”
The bulk of “Why Don’t You Just Die!” plays out like an adrenalized, fetishized approximation of a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Matvey and Andrey pummel each other with an array of found objects, from a desktop computer monitor to a power drill. They throw themselves through walls. They shoot, strangle and dismember one another. Eventually, Olya and Andrey’s former police partner Yevgenich (Michael Gor) arrive to join the calamity and carnage.
Sokolov uses a fantastic assortment of POV-shots to keep his audience enthralled. At first, he said, he worried whether he was deploying “too many different kinds of visual effects and styles in one movie,” but he chose to do it that way because he had written a film that’s largely set in one location with multiple actors.
“It could be a problem, how to make this story really interesting and fun for an audience because they will get tired very quickly looking through the same walls, the same paper, the same location,” he explained, “and that’s how appeared all these small visual jokes and this style and genre changes because just to make the same apartment, the same location, seem new and fresh.”
Calling on a variety of creative influences, from Sergio Leone to Park Chan-wook to Danny Boyle, Sokolov miraculously never lets you forget you’re watching a movie about life in Russia, where each character represents a different archetype, but all embody a mindset or personality found in his country.
“I just tried to make the kind of movie I would like to see by myself in the theater,” he said.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
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This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2020.