Bill Skarsgård’s ‘Boy’ versus Yayan Ruhian as his shaman mentor;
ALL IT TOOK was a director daring enough to ask: what would happen if a knuckleduster was also a gun? In Boy Kills World, the unhinged, ultraviolent feature debut from German filmmaker Moritz Mohr, the answer finally arrives. “We call it the punch-gun. Which is really not that great a name,” Mohr laughs, after debuting the film as part of the Midnight Madness strand of the Toronto International Film Festival. “We were like, ‘We need to spice up this fight.’ Guns are fun, knives are fun and all that — but how about we create something better? Something fresh?” And lo, the punch-gun was born.
That kind of anything-goes wildness gives Boy Kills World its unique tone — aferocious martial-arts revenge thriller set in a dystopian world, with a huge dollop of surreal humour.
There is a trippy vision of bubbling eyeballs. A pirate cereal mascot, Captain Frostington, sponsors televised murder. A delicious macaron is consumed hands-free mid-brawl. And battling through it all is Bill Skarsgård’s deaf, non-verbal ‘Boy’, trained in the jungle by a mysterious shaman (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian, “always the reference [for the character] right from the beginning,” Mohr notes) to take down a nefarious family dynasty, soundtracked by his own quip-laden inner monologue. “I’m still waiting for somebody to write, ‘This fucking tone is all over the place!’” the director admits. “But that was really, really intentional.”
No wonder the combination of brutal action and loopy Looney Tunes energy attracted Sam Raimi, on producing duties after being blown away by the Boy Kills World proof-of-concept trailer Mohr and friends made in Berlin seven years ago. “It was complete insanity,” Mohr recalls of learning his hero was about to watch his short. “I was showing my phone to everyone around me. ‘You see that?!’ Two hours later, we were all hanging out at a Five Guys in LA. The email arrived and it just said, ‘Sam flipped.’ It became our battle cry for the next few weeks.”