Mark Reviews Movies: WHY DON'T YOU JUST DIE!

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 19, 2020

Writer/director Kirill Sokolov's Why Don't You Just Die! is violent, bloody, gruesome, and even amoral, yes, but the film is also more than a bit ingenious in terms of its storytelling and filmmaking. Most of the story, save for some flashbacks, is set inside a single apartment, with only a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The thrill of the film is how Sokolov uses that seemingly restricted setting to create a series of suspenseful and often grisly setpieces.

It begins with Matvei (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), hiding a hammer behind his back, ringing the bell of the apartment of Andrei (Vitaliy Khaev), a police detective. Matvei announces that he's the boyfriend of the cop's daughter Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde). Also in the apartment is Andrei's wife Natasha (Elena Shevchenko), who's quite hospitable to their guest—until the two men get into a massive brawl.

The fight, a brutal battle that results in hidden money flying in the air and a table nearly cleaved in two by a body, is the first of the Sokolv's key sequences. Another has Matvei trying to escape from being handcuffed to a pipe in the bathtub, and that's when we really understand how clever Sokolov is in using limitations to his advantage.

There's a sickening moment when Matvei, going for a hairpin stuck in the drain, uses his tongue to nab the small piece of metal—just after the camera shows a cutaway of the pipe and all its collected gunk. Later, there's a cut to an X-ray view of the guy's thumb snapping as he yanks backwards from the pipe, and that's not even mentioning the horror show when Andrei enters with a power drill.

There's just enough plot to understand why Matvei wants to kill his girlfriend's father, although the flashbacks reveal new details and layers of Matvei's luck at survival, Andrei's corruption, and Olya's motives, as well as why it would be a bad thing if Evgenich (Mikhail Gorevoy), the cop's longtime friend and work partner, finds out about that secret cash. There are plenty of betrayals and double-crosses here, and by the end, we're not really sure if any of these characters is worthy of a scrap of sympathy.

That's not the purpose of Why Don't You Just Die!, anyway. The point is the rush of watching Sokolov's broad inventiveness at work in such a confined locale.

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