Name: They Will Kill You
Director: Kirill Sokolov
Genre: Action, Comedy, Horror
Released: 2026-03-27
Duration: 94 min
Cast: Zazie Beetz, Myha'la, Patricia Arquette, Paterson Joseph, Heather Graham

The housekeeper answers an ad. The building is a New York high-rise with a tenants’ association that runs itself like a charter. Tenants have been disappearing for years, and the woman who took the job is the only person inside the lobby who does not know that yet. They Will Kill You opens on a Manhattan apartment-horror situation so worked-over that the audience has met it before, and that recognition is the device the film is built against.

Kirill Sokolov is not the obvious director for this premise. He arrived through a Russian contained-space dark comedy, Why Don’t You Just Die!, that turned a single living-room apartment into a four-way carnage routine, then disappeared for the cycle of festival circulation that follows a debut nobody could remake. They Will Kill You is the first feature he has built outside that register and outside Russia. The casting is the second part of the argument. Putting Zazie Beetz, Myha’la, and Patricia Arquette inside a Rosemary’s Baby–shaped frame is a producer’s bet that the prestige-television bench can move into a Manhattan satanic-cult thriller without being chewed by the title’s lineage. The trailer has dropped. Whether the bet pays out in a film, or stays a logline the marketing carries, is the question on the table.

Zazie Beetz plays Asia Reaves, the housekeeper who walks through the front door. Beetz has been the calm centre of a string of ensembles, the cooler in Atlanta, the lottery winner in Bullet Train, the friend whose decisions made sense in Joker, and the casting trades on the reliability of that register. The premise depends on the audience trusting Asia as a reader of the room before it stops trusting her. Myha’la plays Maria Reaves, her sister, and brings the second prestige-television export into the building. Her work in Industry was about a young professional surviving inside a hostile institution, and she ports the same scan-and-survive grammar into the cult, which is, in its own way, an institution. Patricia Arquette takes Lily Woodhouse, the building’s senior matriarch and the film’s most loaded casting. Arquette has spent the last cycle of her career on characters whose menace is internal, the composure of someone who knows what is about to happen and has decided not to stop it. Paterson Joseph plays Ray Woodhouse and Heather Graham plays Sharon; both fill out the credited principals.

Sokolov works a methodology, not a genre. The thread between his earlier feature and this one is the conviction that horror, action, and comedy are register marks rather than separate films, and that the same scene can slide between them inside a single cut. TMDB lists They Will Kill You as Action, Comedy, Horror, in that order. The trichotomy is not a marketing compromise. It is what the director makes. The question the film raises before it has fully opened is whether the same trichotomy survives the translation from Russian indie cadence to a studio production with an American genre title and a cast that costs real money. The mechanism that made his first feature work, the small space, the long takes, the dialogue that turned into violence inside one edit, gets harder to maintain at scale.

What They Will Kill You does not resolve, on the basis of what has been released, is its inheritance. The Manhattan-high-rise satanic-cult lineage is one of the most worked grooves in studio horror. Rosemary’s Baby, The Sentinel, the recent Apartment 7A all took the same address and pulled different stories out of it. Each of those films defined itself partly by what it did with a structure the audience already recognised. The trailer for They Will Kill You leads with images of menace inside hallways rather than the building’s facade, a choice that suggests the film is more interested in the inhabitants than in the address. That is a coherent position. It is also the harder one. The cult-as-tenants’-association device only works if the inhabitants are drawn with more interiority than horror typically grants its supporting bench. Whether the script delivers that, or whether the inhabitants become recognisable types again, is the question the marketing has not answered.

The genre mix is also the commercial bet. The action and comedy registers in Sokolov’s earlier work pulled crossover audiences into a film that, on a strict horror reading, might have stayed inside the festival circuit. They Will Kill You is being launched into a wider theatrical economy that has rewarded horror with comedy bones over the last several release cycles. Talk to Me, Late Night with the Devil, the Smile sequence all confirmed the lane. Whether the lane stays open for a film that takes a Russian-indie director’s contained-space rhythm and tries to fit it inside a studio cast budget is the test. The cast list says the studio thinks the rhythm holds. The director’s prior film says it can.

The credited principals are Zazie Beetz, Myha’la, Patricia Arquette, Paterson Joseph, and Heather Graham. They Will Kill You runs ninety-four minutes.

The film opens in France and Belgium on March 25, 2026, expands across Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and other Latin American territories the following day, and arrives in the United States and the United Kingdom on March 27, 2026. A Japanese release is set for May 8, 2026.

Tags: action, horror, Kirill Sokolov, Myha'la, Patricia Arquette, They Will Kill You, Zazie Beetz