CULT KILLER - Mark Reviews Movies

Cult Killer, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 18, 2024

A murder mystery that quickly transitions into a nasty but slightly clever thriller, Cult Killer is anchored by a note-perfect performance by Alice Eve. Whoever thought she could play a hardboiled private investigator, haunted by trauma and battling the "monster" of vengeance lurking in the corners of her conscience, deserves a lot of credit. Eve is a sturdy and often underutilized actor, but here, she gets to show us what too many filmmakers have overlooked during the course of her career.

She plays Cassie Holt, a recovering alcoholic and former librarian whose resilience, determination, and ability to research caught the attention of a relative stranger in a bar one day. She needed help with her drinking—and a little less with the problems she could get herself into by flirting with shady guys for free drinks at the local pub, since Cassie is also trained in a couple forms of self-defense. The help comes in the opening scene from Mikhail, a private detective who lifted himself up from rock bottom once and can spot a similar situation in another person.

Mikhail is played by Antonio Banderas, another actor whose talents were ignored for a while in his own career but who has overcome such typecasting and doubts to repeatedly prove his skill. There's something to seeing these two actors play off each other in a series of flashbacks, with Banderas' character serving as a mentor to Eve's. The connection between them is genuine, and how much of that is the fact that both of these actors possess that shared professional history?

Such a thought is probably reading way too much into what could be seen as a throwaway thriller, but because the on-screen relationship between Eve and Banderas—playing their respective characters with a genuine sense of their pasts weighting down on them—is so strong, the film becomes more than that. It's about haunted people confronting the pain that could have defined or, in one case, does define them, and much of the success of that theme is thanks to how clearly Eve and Banderas set the tone for the material.

The mystery-turned-thriller elements of the film, written by Charles Burnley, are unexpectedly fine, too. Five years after Mikhail suggested that Cassie could battle her addiction after a chance encounter in a pub somewhere in Ireland, she awakens one morning, following a first-time lapse in her recovery, to a phone call. Her recover sponsor and professional mentor is dead. He was brutally murdered in broad daylight by an unidentified killer outside a hotel where he was working on a case.

Rory McMahon (Paul Reid), a local police sergeant, offers Cassie the chance to help the cops find Mikhail's killer. She takes it, obviously, but as it turns out, finding her friend's murderer is barely scratching the surface of a horrific conspiracy.

The resulting plot appears to be treading familiar ground, as Cassie uses her "extra-legal" skills—picking locks, hacking private computers, playing a little too tough with various heavies and possible suspects—to figure out who killed Mikhail and why that person did so. The answer to that comes surprisingly quickly, when Cassie breaks into the mansion of a high-profile attorney (played by Matthew Tompkins), who has a client who's suspected of murdered another of his clients. She finds signs of kidnapping and sex trafficking, and sure enough, another uninvited visitor named Jamie (Shelley Hennig) confirms that story.

By the way, Jamie killed Mikhail, wrongly believing he was part of the shadowy group that abducted her years ago, and she has plans to kill everyone who actually was involved. Jamie thinks Cassie would understand her motive, and to an extent, the detective does, given her own history of abuse. The central question is how far Cassie is willing to take that understanding—basically, whether or not she'll let Jamie carry through with her plan once the investigator realizes the extent of the decades-long abuse being perpetrated and how the perpetrators seem untouchable (Olwen Fouéré plays the head villain with chilling calm).

This is tricky material, considering the subject matter and how easily using it as a springboard for a thriller can turn exploitative. Director Jon Keeyes takes it seriously and, more importantly, is smart enough to let his actors ground the emotional core of the story, even as all of the more sensationalistic plot points play out around them. It helps that the plotting is interrupted by scenes of Cassie and Mikhail chatting over the years—talking recovery, Cassie's interest in becoming a P.I., how mundane the work of a private detective actually is, the idea of a "monster" lingering in everyone's mind, and the notion of what kind of legacy a childless widower such as Mikhail could leave behind.

In terms of the plot, these scenes are unnecessary, and that's exactly why they become so vital here. They're a chance to understand Cassie as more than some clichéd detective, the personal stakes of this case for the character, and that the character's decisions—about how to handle Jamie or allow the killer to continue—mean something about the kind of person she is or could become.

The film pays attention to such details, which goes a long way as the conspiracy deepens, the means of Cassie's investigation become formulaic, and the filmmakers indulge in some grisly, over-the-top turns. Cult Killer shows, though, that even shaky material can be elevated by a focus on characters who actually matter, played by actors who know precisely why they do matter.

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