Roses Have Thoughts

Some films demand to be taken seriously. Others demand to be felt viscerally. Boy Kills World, the feature debut of Moritz Mohr, plants itself squarely in the latter category, a carnivalesque riot of blood, sweat, neon-soaked imagery, and deeply committed absurdity. It is an operatic beat-em-up that plays like a hybrid of Oldboy, Scott Pilgrim, and Mad Max: Fury Road, with a sugar rush of nihilism and heart.

At the centre is Boy, played with a remarkable blend of menace and innocence by Bill Skarsgård. He is mute, his inner monologue voiced with manic glee by H. Jon Benjamin, and he’s been forged into a weapon of vengeance after the brutal murder of his family by the grotesquely fascistic Van Der Koy dynasty. What follows is not merely a revenge plot but a phantasmagorical odyssey through a dystopia where violence is sport, trauma is theatre, and identity is as fluid as genre.

The film’s strength lies in its commitment to its offbeat tone. Boy’s world is as much a cartoon as it is a nightmare, where bone-crunching martial arts are intercut with hallucinations, video-game UI effects, and slapstick humour. Mohr’s direction is unabashedly kinetic, with action sequences that border on the operatic, thanks in part to the bone-snapping choreography by Yayan Ruhian (The Raid). If the narrative coherence occasionally falters, it’s by design—the film wants to overload, to overwhelm, and, crucially, to entertain.

The supporting cast gamely embraces the madness. Famke Janssen and Michelle Dockery deliver gloriously unhinged villainy, while Sharlto Copley chews the scenery like he’s at a buffet. Jessica Rothe adds a note of chaotic levity, and Andrew Koji brings some grounded physicality to the otherwise kaleidoscopic melee.

What elevates Boy Kills World above mere grindhouse homage is its underlying sincerity. Beneath the stylised bloodshed lies a strange emotional core: a young man’s grief, warped into a weapon by the systems of oppression that orphaned him. It’s not deep, exactly, but it’s not hollow either. The film is aware of its own absurdity without being smug, and that tonal balance is rare in modern genre cinema.

Admittedly, the film won’t be for everyone. The violence is relentless, the tone whiplashes between comedy and carnage, and the story, while emotionally resonant, is thinly sketched. But these are features, not bugs, for a film that wants to knock you off your axis and keep you spinning.

A delirious mashup of brutal action and anarchic humour, Boy Kills World doesn’t just wear its influences on its sleeve, it tattoos them across its chest, smashes through walls, and winks while doing it. Hyper-stylised, gleefully violent, and unexpectedly heartfelt.

IMDB