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Director Kirill Sokolov just made a name for himself. While he’s been working for a while, the filmmaker just made the bloody and bonkers “They Will Kill You.” 2025 had a lot of great action movies, and I know there’s still an awful lot of 2026 left, but this is probably going to be among the year’s best of the genre. And one of the movie’s biggest Easter eggs may offer up a very good reason for a rewatch.
The movie centers on a desperate woman named Asia (Zazie Beetz) who answers an ad for a live-in housekeeper at a luxurious New York City high-rise apartment building. Upon arrival, she uncovers the building’s sinister history involving a Satanic cult lurking in the shadows.
Ahead of the release of “They Will Kill You,” I had the chance to speak with Sokolov, who also directed one of the best international action movies of the 2010s, “Why Don’t You Just Die!” He explained that crafting the new film’s hotel, The Virgil, was a combination of real-world locations and very particular set design. Here’s what he had to say about it:
“The whole production was in Cape Town. So we found streets, we found some places, but also we had to add on top. Basically we built the first floor that we stitched to a real building, and we built our own doors and interior of [The] Virgil. Then, inside — because the movie is so action-heavy and this action includes rain and water that floods everything, fire effects, snow, and all of this, and also because the camera was so active — we needed to have the sets almost like LEGO where we could just remove one wall, open the hole, [and] bring the camera here from the ceiling.”
That approach ties directly into the aforementioned Easter egg.
They Will Kill You contains a major Dante’s Inferno metaphor
Warner Bros.
“We decided, okay, we’ll just build everything,” Kirill Sokolov continued. “We were thinking about how to build it, how to make it exciting for the audience to stay inside of the one building for 90 minutes. So that’s where this very specific and clear progression of how the environment changes with the character’s journey [came from].”
That’s admittedly a lot of preamble, but there’s it’s important to understand that The Virgil is as much of a character in “They Will Kill You” as The Continental is in the world of “John Wick.” Speaking further about the Satanic hotel where the bulk of the movie’s carnage takes place, Sokolov revealed that The Virgil is something of a metaphor for Dante’s “Inferno.” As he explained:
“It kind of represents Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ with each floor like a new circle of Hell and they go up, but actually they go down straight in the heart of Hell. If you rewatch the movie with this idea, you actually recognize a lot of like symbols and elements and portions that give you a small clue.”
Published in 1321, “Inferno” is the first part of Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” series. Very basically, it’s a journey through nine distinct circles of Hell. (“Evil Dead” director Fede Alvarez was going to make a “Dante’s Inferno” movie at one point, but that project never came to pass.) The symbols and various imagery that represent the distinct circles of Hell might be easy for audiences to miss the first time around, since there’s a lot going on in “They Will Kill You,” but this knowledge could help give you an added appreciation for the movie and will undoubtedly color subsequent viewings.
“They Will Kill You” hits theaters on March 27, 2026.
