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.