Too few films set out with actual ambition. Very often they work in familiar tropes, play it structurally safe, and, in all, seek to do a workaday job of entertaining audiences.
Kill Your Lover sets its sights higher. It nails its theme early on and then excavates it brilliantly, taking you on a dark descent into the fundamental nature of toxicity in a dysfunctional relationship.
At the outset, we see this central conceit framed by Paige Gilmour’s Dakota, as she rehearses a break up speech she plans to give to her boyfriend, Axel, played by Shane Quigley-Murphy. The speech itself is a passive-aggressive masterpiece so full of lame clichés and platitudes that it seems designed to psychologically damage the man, something Dakota’s friend Rose (May Kelly) points out.
When Axel overhears Dakota’s plans to do the deed he sets out to manipulate the situation, using a new sickness to elicit sympathy and ultimately delay and derail Dakota’s plan. So far, we are only in the realm of low-level toxicity.
However, the longer the truth is denied, the more things disintegrate and start to spiral. Most notably this is in their sex life when Paige has him tie her up, something Axel says makes him feel uncomfortable – but in such an insufferable way one wonders if it conceals a deeper pleasure in this kind of control. Around the same time, he piles more pressure on Dakota to make the responses of a loving girlfriend, until it finally leads us to a momentous revelation about him. It’s not that he deeply loves Dakota – it’s that he doesn’t love her at all. Co-dependency is not love.
And so it is from him that the toxic veins, the film’s metaphor, start to spread from him towards Dakota and two unfortunate paramedics, killing the latter two.
This is interspersed with Soderbergh-style cutaways of an alternative relationship narrative where Dakota and Axel indulge in petty relationship squabbles which are almost hatefully generic. It’s not clear if it this timeline is from an earlier stage in their relationship and thus the beginning of their problems, or a depressing imagined future where both cancel out each other’s individuality and humanity because they never faced the truth when it mattered.
Finally, it becomes a fight for survival with Dakota bidding to be free of Axel and his hazardous veins which now seemingly give him a strange new power, including, potentially over her.
Kill Your Lover is not without its issues. Most notably its metaphor playing alongside the thing it is a metaphor for gives it a limited narrative range. I would have loved to see just a hint at a few more layers, especially political and sociological and the toxic expectations placed on relationships in this time. The 77-minute run time would have allowed for it.
I would also like to have seen more development of the visual theme, perhaps culminating in the toxins melting Dakota and Axel together in a deformed they-deserve-each-other embrace of poison and mutual and self-hatred.
Also, Dakota’s friend disappears when she could have been a more integral part, giving an extra dimension to their relational toxicity, perhaps by being part of a drunken threesome with Dakota and Axel they no longer talk about.
However, all in all, KYL’s individuality and inexorable exploration of its theme are what make it fresh. The claustrophobia of its single location, adds to that theme and feels satisfying, complementing the film’s pacy plunge into an inner hell.
If you like your genre, especially your horror, but want to see something just a little bit different, a little bit more perceptive than most, and see what the UK indie scene is producing right now amongst the current gloom, then this is a great choice for a Saturday night.
Peter Stead caught up with Alex and Kier for an exclusive interview on Blazing Minds
Kill Your Lover is not without its issues
Movie title: Kill Your Lover (2023)
Movie description: Dakota and Axel's once passionate relationship has become poisoned by resentment. As emotions boil over, Axel starts sprouting black veins and excreting an acidic liquid. His touch burns flesh, and a life-and-death battle ensues.
Date published: June 7, 2024
Country: UK
Duration: 1h 17m
Director(s): Alix Austin, Keir Siewert
Actor(s): Paige Gilmour, Shane Quigley-Murphy, May Kelly
Genre: Horror
As a screenwriter, Peter Stead has had short scripts produced in the Netherlands, Germany and the U.K. Believe, a found footage short he also produced and starred in, won awards at Romford Horror Festival and the Fortean Film Festival. In terms of short stories, Camera Anima Mea was published by Horrified Magazine and When We Fall is set to be included in the forthcoming anthology ‘British Gothic’ by Red Cape Publishing.
