Filmmaker John Patton Ford’s sophomore feature, How to Make a Killing — inspired by the 1949 British classic Kind Hearts and Coronets — is a sadistic dark comedy about temptation, inheritance, and the moral ruin that follows when a man deadens his conscience so completely that, faced with choice after choice, he makes the wrong one every time.
The film’s first major moral decision, however, belongs not to its protagonist but to his mother. In the film’s macabre and unexpectedly anti-abortion opening, she rejects a life of luxury and chooses instead the life of her unborn child, despite the consequence of being cut off from the vast Redfellow family fortune. Ed Harris, portraying the Redfellow patriarch with a menacing, cadaverous countenance, looms over these early scenes with a vaguely Nosferatu-like chill.
That child grows up to become Becket Redfellow, played by the charismatic and deeply likable Glen Powell. His childhood is marked by a comically cruel string of tragedies. His father, upon witnessing Becket’s birth, promptly dies of an aneurysm (a rare case of losing your father to childbirth), leaving Becket to be raised solely by his mother, before she, too, dies young, succumbing to cancer.
Ford frames the story in a quasi-Amadeus mode. Becket recounts the tale of his life from prison, confessing his sins to a priest. Other than the conventional paths of labor and career advancement, Becket knows that his one true lottery ticket lies in the grotesquely large Redfellow inheritance, which will eventually pass to a sole surviving heir. Looking over the family tree, he bitterly observes that “there are seven of them alive while my mother lay in the ground and I lived in a duplex.”
At first, Becket appears merely resentful rather than monstrous. He works in a menswear shop, and, from supplying coffee to his boss and lugging around towering piles of chinos, we are meant to understand he must be a diligent and hard worker. Yet even this modest Manhattan career is short-lived. He is informed he is being transferred to a New Jersey warehouse so that the owner’s young son can take his place. Nepotism remains a prevalent theme in his life — Becket only begrudges being denied the nepotism he feels entitled to, and this humiliation proves his final straw.
The screenplay does a great deal to lull the viewer along with Becket’s ensuing familial murder spree. The Redfellows are not exactly missionaries or exemplars of virtue. They are a gallery of grotesque coked-up brokers, entitled profligates, and assorted trust-fund parasites who make themselves easy to resent and easier still to eliminate. Ford understands that black comedy works best when it draws the audience into complicity, and How to Make a Killing is often uncomfortably successful at getting us to root for a serial killer. Powell’s effortless charm only adds to the effect.
Among the more memorable clan members is Noah Redfellow, played by The Office’s Zach Woods, who appears as a delusional and insufferable dilettante artist. He proudly shows off his rooftop sauna-cum-darkroom and notes, with exquisite pretension, that “this whole ship was made out of recycled toothbrushes or tampons in Lithuania.” Through Noah, however, Becket is introduced to Ruth, played by Jessica Henwick, one of the film’s few refreshingly grounded characters. Ruth is neither dazzled by money nor especially interested in status. She wants to finish teacher’s college and teach high school English. “It is scary to dream small,” she says in one of the film’s more poignant lines. “Nobody teaches us about that.”
Ruth’s questions reveal the emptiness at Becket’s core. The most revealing thing about him is not merely that he’s a murderer, but that he has no real answer for why he wants what he wants. When asked what he would do with immense wealth, he cannot say. He could offer any number of recognizable fantasies from retiring to a chateau or vineyard in Europe, collecting paintings, or buying some absurd sports car. But Becket has no vision at all. He becomes a serial killer as a means to no discernible end.
But beneath this hollow pursuit of money, there is still a semblance of humanity, capable of salvation. He and Ruth bond over literature — Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, appropriately enough. Ruth is affectionate toward him and expects nothing in return — she likes him for his genial personality (obviously not privy to his side hustle of using Ancestry-dot-com as a murder list) and isn’t hankering for some lavish fortune. Ruth represents the life Becket could choose: one of modesty and decency.
Opposed to her is Julia, played by Margaret Qualley, whose role in the film makes little sense outside her symbolic function as temptation incarnate. A childhood acquaintance, Julia’s attraction to Becket is transparently bound up in what his surname and prospective inheritance promise. Impeccably clad in designer fashion, she is a glamorous embodiment of appetite and vanity.
The central tension of How to Make a Killing lies in which of these women — and which of these lives — Becket chooses. The tragedy is that Becket achieves something like objective success long before the body count reaches its apex. He rises from a duplex childhood to a doorman apartment in Manhattan, lands a lucrative finance career, and finds himself loved by a good woman. But unlike his mother, Becket cannot recognize that what he already possesses is worth more than the fortune he is chasing. “You had a romance and a good job,” and he is asked in one scene, “‘Wasn’t this enough?’” “Enough what?” he replies.
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In the end, How to Make a Killing is a clever and entertaining remake, buoyed by strong, charismatic performances. What lingers most, though, is the sadness of watching a man offered multiple chances at an ordinary, decent life and rejecting each one in pursuit of something he cannot even define.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.