Ben Wheatley

In Kill List (2011), the discomfort starts at home, before the hitman business has properly begun. Wheatley lets the crime story grow out of an atmosphere that is already sour. Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley give the criminal partnership an ease that makes its brutality harder to dismiss. We were unnerved by the domestic friction because the cast made it feel embarrassingly familiar. Wheatley is good at keeping us with people whose company we would otherwise decline, and the grim humour gives us a reason to stay.

His first feature, Down Terrace (2009), had already brought crime and black comedy into a domestic setting. Sightseers (2012) extended the black comedy to a road trip, followed by the psychedelic horror of A Field in England (2013). Larger productions followed, including High-Rise (2015) and Rebecca (2020), but scale alone tells us little about what suits him. In Free Fire (2016), he keeps a dozen people in one warehouse without losing track of where anyone stands.

Amy Jump, his frequent collaborator as writer and editor, is central to the work we most admire here. Their Kill List screenplay gives the hitmen’s conversations an everyday sound. Jump also edits alongside Wheatley, Barney Jordan and Robin Hill, finding a pace that lets the domestic discomfort persist as the crime story becomes more forceful. Jim Williams’s score makes even those ordinary exchanges feel unsafe. The late stretch is less convincing than the build-up, and the graphic violence makes this a recommendation with a firm warning.

Meg 2: The Trench (2023) gives us the opposite problem: a long wait for Wheatley to find the comedy. For much of its first hour, the film stays down in the dark with a mining conspiracy, losing track of people on the sea floor. There is welcome, cheerful silliness later on, but too much of the film feels like an anonymous hired job. For an introduction, start with Kill List, provided everyone watching has the stomach for it.