Boys Kills World (2023)

Boy Kills World is a dystopian thriller staring Bill Skarsgard (Boy), who does not say a single word through the entire 111 minute run time. It is however, one of his best performances to date (in my entirely unprofessional opinion). Instead his inner monologue is narrated by H. Jon Benjamin (Bob’s Burgers) with just the right amount of comedy to lighten the graphic and violent action sequences. Skarsgard’s facial expressions show you that his character is a killing machine, uncertain of himself at time, but solely focused on his mission. Now, lets get into the plot.

In the opening scene, we see a boy and his family being offered during an annual ceremony called The Culling. Basically, the ruler of the city, Hilda Van Der Koy, decides that there are people she needs to get rid of to maintain her power, think The Hunger Games but without the pomp and circumstance and it’s everyone and not just teenagers and basically, it’s just public executions. Well, that’s where we find Boy. He, his mother, and his younger sister are on the chopping block this year. Hilda coldly dispatches Boy’s mother and then we see as Boy’s sister’s hand slips from his own, presumably because she has also been shot in the head by Hilda.

From their, the movie gets a little vague. Boy, narrating this entire time, wakes up in a hole in the jungle and we come to find out that he somehow escaped the execution alive and is now being trained by a mysterious man called the Shaman so that he can kill Hilda. There’s an extended montage where we see Boy grow into a man. Where the action picks up is when Boy witnesses Glen Van Der Koy, Hilda’s brother in law, kill an innocent civilian while attempting to round up citizens of the city for another installment of The Culling. Boy becomes enraged and is able to infiltrate the Van Der Koy’s lair, where he hooks up with one of the Van Der Koy’s slaves and kills a bunch of people including Glen who had agreed to help them kill Hilda. Turns out, the slave, Basho, is a member of a resistance group who hate the Van Der Koy’s. The only problem is all but one guy is dead, killed by the Van Der Koy’s. Benny, the only survivor is on board with the whole killing Hilda thing. Oh, also I should mention, Boy is deaf mute, but he can read lips, however, for some reason, he cannot read Benny’s lips which results in some very comical scenes that I cannot do justice to here. Also, Boy is having constant hallucinations of his dead sister at the age she was when she died.

Ok, long story short, Boy infiltrates the Van Der Koy’s manor, kills who he thinks is Hilda (it’s not) and is captured by the Van Der Koys. He then is served up during the live TV presentation of The Culling for all to see. Hilda comes out and give a short speech about how The Culling is a good thing, blah blah blah, and at one point she turns and looks at Boy and seems to hesitate at the sight of him. She then proceeds to whip out a gun and go on a rambling tangent (turns out she’s insane and her sister Melanie is the brains behind the entire operation). Well, The Culling begin and Boy is able to free himself. He dispatches a fair number of Hilda’s men, but is subdued by 4 people and it appears we’ve reached the end of the road for Boy. A person in a goat costume comes to smash his head in, but wait! It’s Basho. He and Benny were able to infiltrate the Van Der Koy’s ranks because while they were all concerned with Boy, Basho and Benny snuck in in disguise. During the rest of the fight, Benny is kill and Basho is severely wounded. Basho tried to push on but dies while Boy kills another 25 or so men.

Boy is then on his way to the bunker where the entire Van Der Koy family is hold up. He rides the elevator down and as the door slides open, you expect Boy to be met with a hail of gunfire. Instead, June 27, the Van Der Koy’s chief of security and 4 of her men are waiting there. They escort Boy into a large, lavish room, with Hilda at the center. Boy is looking around and all we’re seeing is his face. He appears to grow dizzy and like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Is the reality of having his mortal enemy standing in front of him too much? The answer is given to us quickly when we are shown a portrait of the Van Der Koy’s where Boy is seated right behind Hilda, implying that he is her son!

Through flashbacks we see that the Shaman’s family were the ones executed in the first scene and that Boy, at Hilda’s direction, was the one pulling the trigger. He shot the Shamans wife and two kids and then was ordered to shoot the Shaman. At that point though, he had lost the nerve and fired several shots randomly and in the chaos, the Shaman was able to escape. Boy was all in his feelings after that and also ran away ending up in the jungle where the Shaman found him and brainwashed him into believing his life was totally different.

When we finally return to the bunker, Hilda is telling Boy she loves him and she missed him and then she drops a real bomb on him. June 27 is his sister, the sister he thought was murdered. Hilda is trying to convince Boy that he should rejoin the family but she quickly realizes it’s not working and orders June 27 to kill him. You can see June is conflicted. It’s her brother, who we’ve seen throughout the movie, loves her and she loves him. Well, maybe not so unexpectedly, but very satisfactorily, she ends up killing Hilda. This results in a massive fight between the Van Der Koy’s men and Boy and June 27. They dispatch of them fairly easily, but just as you think they are going to escape and live happily ever after, the Shaman shows up. This leads into a long fight sequence where, to be honest, I didn’t know if both Boy and June 27 were going to make it out alive. The Shaman holds them both off for a long time and it ends with Boy, with the help of his inner child, ending the Shaman. Boy crawls over to June and she tells him to leave her to die and go live his life. Of course he can’t do that so they limp together into the sunset. It’s not actually a sunset, it’s just down the bunkers cement corridor, but same same.

The final scene in the movie is a flashback to the pair as children. Boy and Mina, June 27’s real name, are in the arcade playing a video game together, something that was established throughout the movie as something they liked to do together. This is where we get the only spoken word from Boy in the entire movie. Mina asks if he’ll stay with her and he says, “Always.”

Now, my comments. First, what I didn’t like. Honestly, there wasn’t a lot I didn’t like. Some of the scenes were a little graphic, but what did I expect from a movie called Boy Kills World.

This next point isn’t necessarily a dislike, just something I thought might have been interesting. The Van Der Koy’s were interesting characters, but they don’t get much screen time and how they came to power isn’t explained very well. I just think that could have been explored a little better. It’s also possible they did and my brain was not switched on at the time.

The things I liked: there was no romance/sex. There is only one couple in the story, Glen and Melanie Van Der Koy, and their interactions are limited, mostly because Glen dies in the scene right after he speaks to his wife. In a day and age where I feel like romance and/or sex is shoehorned into every movie and tv show I watch, it was actually kinda nice to see a movie that was virtually romance free.

I also really enjoyed the lack of dialogue. It’s not only Boy who has limited lines. Benny speaks entirely in nonsense, the Shaman doesn’t have many lines, and June 27 wears a helmet that scrolls messages across the visor instead of her having to say them out loud. Overall, this movie did a great job at not over explaining things using dialogue. It was very much a show don’t tell kind of movie and I like that because it feels so much more realistic. Normal human interaction relys so much on assumptions and implications, norms, and interpretation of facial expressions that when a movie is set on explaining every plot point using dialogue, it can really take you out of the experience. It also feels like the director respects the audience's intelligence.

The relationship between Boy and Mina is also very well done. When we only see Mina as a little girl though Boys hallucinations, she’s what’s keeping him human. When he gets caught up with his mission, she brings him back. We don’t get to see them interact too much as adults, but you can tell the love and affection is still there. At one point, Mina says that she never stopped looking for Boy, even when the adults in her life told her that he was dead. There is a post credit scene that shows them eating cereal together, which is a call back to scenes earlier in the movie.

I also like the character of June 27, before we learn she’s Mina. I generally hate tough female characters because they don’t feel like real women to me. It feels like the character was written as a man and then last second, without changing anything, they cast a female actress to play the character. June 27 doesn’t feel that way. It feels like the character is a woman and thinks and acts like one. Also, after she’s revealed to be Mina, it doesn’t feel like the character changes. Sure, her motivations and her perception of reality are different, but it doesn’t feel like she went from the head of security to a damsel in distress, which can happen sometimes.

Overall, I thought this movie was great. Is it the best movie of all time? No, but I think it should be given it’s due. It’s an original project that is well acted, well shot, and a really fun time. There are a lot of clever choices the director made that keep you on your toes. I expected this movie to be pretty generic, but I think a lot of care and good decision making went into this movie. But what do I know, you’ll have to see it for yourself.