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Russia · 2018
1h 40m
Director Kirill Sokolov
Starring Vitaliy Khaev, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Mikhail Gorevoy, Igor Grabuzov
Genre Action, Comedy, Crime, Thriller
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In this dark comedy, a man tries to kill his girlfriend's father as revenge for the abuse she has told him about. However, when he arrives at the father's apartment, he finds the situation to be far more complicated and difficult than he could have expected, leading to a violent series of twists and turns.
CineVue by Christopher Machell
Aside from the film’s more immediate pleasures, what is perhaps most intriguing about Why Don’t You Just Die! is Sokolov’s almost visible attempt to find his own voice: among this melange of film-school influences, it’s undoubtedly there, though perhaps it hasn’t quite formed yet.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
Sokolov’s debut feature is a clever, bloody as hell, often hilarious virtuoso exercise in excruciating harm-doing among mendacious people.
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
These people are so greedily narcissistic that the best fun lies in what they’re willing to do to each other and how they react upon realizing that truth.
Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray
Why Don’t You Just Die! is too cartoonish and glib to have much to say about Russia or about genre films in general. But it is stylish and snazzy — a confident throwback to the knowing exploitation pictures of yesteryear.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Why Don’t You Just Die! is an accomplished film that makes the very most of its limited sets, without seeming constricted or stagey.
Set almost entirely in a corrupt cop’s Moscow apartment, Why Don’t You Just Die! is a neatly conceived dark-comedy chamber piece — à la the Wachowski siblings’ clockwork-perfect queer-noir “Bound” or Sidney Lumet’s airtight but otherwise diabolical “Deathtrap” — in which a simple setup spirals into unimaginably twisted mayhem.
Why Don’t You Just Die! is a grimly gruesome and laugh-out-loud tale of lies, double-crosses, brawls, gunplay and torture. And if Madonna’s ex-husband didn’t learn Russian to make it, writer-director Kirill Sokolov gives him quite the tip of the cap in this dark movie of murder and mayhem in Mother Russia.
RogerEbert.com by Simon Abrams
The gory, but weirdly blasé Russian black comedy Why Don’t You Just Die! feels like a gross exercise in style that’s also a passable tribute to Jim Thompson’s bleakly hilarious crime novels, and a brain-dead critique of post-Soviet consumerism.
The Observer (UK) by Wendy Ide
It won’t be for everyone, certainly, but if social distancing has you not just climbing the walls but contemplating punching a hole in them, this might just be the perfect cathartic lockdown movie.
The A.V. Club by William Hughes
At its best when breathlessly racing from one set piece to the next, Sokolov’s comedy really only has a single central joke to its name—gouts of blood firing in high-pressure streams at moments when the audience least expects them—and yet delivers that simple dose of brutal humor with mindful precision.
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