Review: WHY DON'T YOU JUST DIE! Is a Bloody Fun Time
With debut directors, you can often pinpoint exactly who their greatest influences are. That’s not intrinsically good or bad. It’s all about how you adapt those influences into your story and own style. Writer/director Kirill Sokolov has definitely enjoyed his fair share of films from Quentin Tarantino, Park Chan-wook, and Edgar Wright. Why Don’t You Just Die! wears that love on its sleeve. Is it obvious? Yes, but Sokolov wields this in a way that starts to gel into its own.
The story centers around a single Russian apartment where young Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is going to attempt to kill detective Andrey (Vitaliy Khaev) at the request of Andrey’s daughter, Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde). But, once Andrey proves harder to kill than expected, revelations start to occur as we learn more about these characters.
It’s a simplistic, almost stage-like story that kicks off at the most interesting point and unravels itself with confidence. The non-linear approach to the story helps the pacing so that things never feel like they are stopping to just give the audience an info dump. There is a stretch of the movie that takes a pretty significant detour, but it boosts itself by having an over-the-top bit of violent aftermath.
This is all held up by pitch-perfect performances from the small but capable ensemble. Vitaliy Khaev shines the brightest as he’s originally presented as a standard villain, but the more we learn about Andrey, the more Khaev is given to play with. It’s a character that could work as one-note, but the clever script and Khaev’s performance add layers to this person.
To be fair, Why Don’t You Just Die! is something of a slight movie. There’s nothing wrong with being slight if a movie knows it, and Why Don’t You Just Die! is perfectly content to play to its darkly humorous and stylistic strengths. Early in the movie, a character gets their face smashed with a television. That should give you a sense of the attitude and intention of Why Don’t You Just Die!. It wants to be an assault and it definitely succeeds at that. It’s a propulsive, psychotic, and gleefully good time. I can’t wait to see what Sokolov has planned next.
