JP Nunez
In a genre as old as horror, it can seem like there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s easy to think that everything has been done before, so if you watch enough scary movies, you’ll eventually start seeing nothing but the same tired ideas recycled over and over again…right? Well, not quite. When I first heard about Kill Your Lover, it didn’t seem like anything I had ever seen before. Sure, the movie takes a few ideas from some noticeable predecessors, but this body horror anti-romance promised to combine those influences in a fresh way. It sounded like the kind of original fare genre fans live for, and now that I’ve seen the film myself, I’m happy to report that it’s pretty damn good.
Kill Your Lover was written, directed, and co-produced by Alix Austin and Keir Siewer, and it stars Paige Gilmour and Shane Quigley Murphy as Dakota and Axel, a couple whose relationship has soured. They started out totally happy, but as time went on, Dakota came to realize that they just weren’t right for each other. She now wants to break up, but when Axel overhears her talking about it to one of her friends, he turns into a monster.
And I mean that literally. He starts to physically manifest the toxicity of their relationship in his body, and as his condition worsens, he begins acting like a monster too. It just becomes too much for Dakota to bear, and when Axel’s mysterious illness infects her as well, she decides to take matters into her own hands.
As you might be able to guess from that brief plot synopsis, Kill Your Lover faces a daunting task. The movie has to show us why Dakota and Axel’s relationship is so dysfunctional, and thankfully, it’s totally up to the task. When these characters first meet, they hit it off immediately, and things get hot and heavy pretty quickly.
In fact, as far as we can tell, Dakota and Axel seem to spend the early days of their relationship almost entirely in bed, and to be frank, that rubbed me the wrong way at first. Good relationships are based on love and genuine personal connection, not sex, so this one felt a bit one dimensional. But as I thought about it a bit more, I realized something.
That’s the point. Much like Love Lies Bleeding, Kill Your Lover shows why you shouldn’t base a relationship on sex. It doesn’t work, and Dakota and Axel are proof. Everything seems great at first, but as time goes on, their incompatibilities rear their ugly heads.
For instance, when these characters first meet, Dakota has a cool punk rock aesthetic, but by the time she’s ready to break it off, she looks more likely to drive a mom van than jump into a mosh pit. Axel has changed her entire personality, and she simply can’t take it anymore.
That’s just one example, but it’s a super toxic relationship all around. And when Axel starts to manifest that toxicity in his body, it’s a thing of grotesque beauty. His veins become black and disgustingly oversized, and they even appear on the walls around him. On top of that, he also secretes a sticky substance that can give people chemical burns, and he uses it to do some really heinous things.
I don’t want to give anything away, but trust me, this guy isn’t a kind-hearted, Guillermo del Toro-esque monster. He’s truly evil, and when people get in his way, terrible things happen to them.
That being said, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Most of this violence happens just off screen (probably for budgetary reasons), so Kill Your Lover isn’t a gorefest. It has a couple of cool shots that show us just how horrific Axel has become, but by and large, we only see enough to get a general idea of what’s going on. The movie lets us fill in most of the bloody details ourselves, and while that’s going to disappoint some viewers, it’ll probably make the whole thing even more disturbing for others.
That all comes together to create an effective and monstrous body horror allegory for toxic relationships, but I can’t quite say that Kill Your Lover is a perfect film. It has a very lean runtime of about 77 minutes, so it doesn’t have time to flesh out its characters or its story beyond the absolute bare minimum. It does just enough to make its point, but I wanted a little bit more.
Most notably, there’s a scene towards the end of the movie where Dakota and Axel have an argument and accuse each other of things we never actually see them do, and that violates one of the golden rules of cinema. Film is a visual medium, so movies need to show us things rather than just tell us about them.
Unfortunately though, this scene tells us a number of things the film doesn’t have time to show us, and that encapsulates the one real problem with Kill Your Lover. The story just needs some more time to breathe, so an extra 10-20 minutes or so of character development would’ve brought this movie to the next level.
But despite not reaching its full potential, Kill Your Lover still gets the job done. It makes its point succinctly and enjoyably, so it succeeds at creating a unique body horror experience that hardcore genre fans won’t want to miss.
Kill Your Lover is set to hit VOD on June 7.
