Kill Your Friends review: An interesting story backed up by an immense soundtrack.
Kill Your Friends review
Based on the novel by John Niven, Kill Your Friends highlights the seedy underbelly of the nineties UK music scene. It stars Nicholas Hoult as our anti-hero Stelfox, a conniving and ambitious music exec who will do absolutely anything to get ahead, even if that means offing a co-worker or framing them for something really terrible.
Hoult has grown up on film; remember he was that boy that everything was about in About a Boy. He’s always managed to make clever career choices and seems to easily traverse between blockbusters such as X-Men: First Class and Mad Max: Fury Road, and smaller projects like Warm Bodies and now this. Kill Your Friends is much darker material to what we’ve seen Hoult do before, but he plays the part superbly. Stelfox doesn’t have any redeeming qualities and really is the villain of the story. Hoult channels his inner Patrick Bateman (there’s even a pseudo-homage to the rain mac scene), and holds the film together brilliantly.
Backing up Hoult is a stellar cast. Ed Skrein in particular is great as manager to a truly awful girl band that make The Spice Girls sound like Whitney Houston, highlighting that he’s far better suited to a supporting role. James Corden also takes time out from his presenting gig to play Stelfox’s colleague Waters – a lazy slob with a Coke habit who finds himself with a target on his back after he gets the promotion Stelfox believes is for him.
Kill your Friends review
If you like a bit of grit, depravity and darkness you’ll find Kill Your Friends to be an excellent bedfellow. The tone of the tale is jet black, with no redeeming characters at all, everyone either want’s to climb the ladder or is obsessed with their own five minutes of fame. Even the police are easily corrupted and seduced by the idea of being a rock star. Most worryingly of all, the author John Niven actually spent time working in the industry around the time that the film is set and you have to wonder how many of the events weren’t entirely fictional. If you like your films with a heart-warming resolution or a main character who reforms from their bad ways then you should probably give this a miss. Kill Your Friends is American Psycho by way of Filth, and neither of them ended well.
A film set inside the music industry, especially during the nineties, can’t not have an excellent soundtrack. With bands including The Prodigy, Radiohead, Echo and the Bunnymen and Blur, Kill Your Friends offers one of the best movie soundtracks since Trainspotting. It’s a nostalgic trip down music memory lane and is a must for your Spotify list.
Kill Your Friends is a dark and complex peek behind the music industry curtain. An interesting story backed up by an immense soundtrack, Kill your Friends shows that Hoult has leading man charisma and one heck of a dark side.
Kill Your Friends review by Kat Hughes, November 2015.
Kill Your Friends arrives in UK cinemas on Friday 6th November.
