PopHorror Let's Get Scared
I’ve always found something darkly narcissistic about the culture of self-help, manifesting, and life-coaching. All of this constant exploration of self, self, self has to affect how you see other people, and taking to heart what the universe owes you sounds like a God Complex. It’s these dark instincts that guide the new film from Staten Cousins-Roe, A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life. It’s a pitch black comedy about two women finding themselves by murdering a parade of gurus, guides, and sage-burners.
Roe brings all of these aspects to bear in making A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life work on numerous levels. It’s at times unsettling, hilarious, pointed, and moving, all whilst leaping from genre to genre. The plot follows a young woman, Lou (Katie Brayben: Doctor Who TV series), as she bounces from self-help program to program, all to no avail. She lives under the thumb of her vicious and codependent mother and feels hobbled by her life. Brayben grafts this fatalist desperation to the spine of her performance. Her weak smile and small voice immediately bring to mind a child living in fear of a punishment that may never come, or, perhaps, never left. At a seminar, she meets another life coach, Val (Poppy Roe: This Way Out 2013), who charms her with her dazzling confidence. In no time at all, Lou is joining Val on her quest to become the greatest life-coach of all time.
Rather than be a straight up horror film, A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life is a movie made for horror fans, balancing their blood-hungry expectations with the story it wants to tell. It’s closer to a Tucker & Dale than it is American Psycho, taking all the devices of the genre and flipping them for its own purposes. The murder scenes are playful, zany, and compelling, particularly in the beginning before Lou learns of Val’s dark secret.
One sequence, in particular, that occurs late in the film elevates A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life to one of the better films of the year for me. It occurs during Val and Lou’s trip to a reverse birth self-actualization exercise. I won’t spoil anything, but the exercises take a surreal, nightmarish toll on Lou that finally confronts the deferred horror of the murderous road trip. It’s biting, brutal and necessary for where this film wants to go.
Also notable is A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life’s framing device, a series of self-help steps to unlock one’s inner potential delivered in a fireside chat by the film’s almost mythologically successful self-help guru, Chuck Knoah (played to Tony Robbins-skewering perfection by Ben Lloyd-Hughes: Divergent 2014). As Lou and Val plunge deeper into darkness, the film itself gets brighter and brighter as we watch these ladies walk further along Knoah’s path to true personal success.
Similar subject matter was tackled in Luke Ricci’s How to Be A Serial Killer in 2008, but, with the exception of a standout performance from Daemon Clarke as the film’s motivationally speaking, serial-killing lead, that film falls flat. Roe’s decision to combine his murderous self-help satire with the sentimental trappings of a road movie and the film’s pitch-perfect cast make A Serial Killer’s Guide to Life a fun engaging trip into unlocking the true potential of its scalpel-sharp premise.
