Netflix Polish films are a mixed bag of content. There are movies in the last year and one before that is borderline creepy and obscene, as in 365 Days and 365 Days: This Day. Delivery by Christmas, on the other hand, is a slice of a life story set around the holiday season. Kill Me If You Dare is a bizarre film that tells the story of a couple who won the lottery and are wondering how to spend it. Directed by Filip Zylber, the Polish romance thriller film was released on February 13, 2024, on Netflix.
Kill Me If You Dare is just over one hour and thirty minutes, and it begins with Piotr and Natalia getting engaged in the most romantic fashion. A few years later, both are financially struggling as a married couple, and they have begun to detest each other. Piotr is constantly worried about why Natalia cannot understand him anymore. Meanwhile, Natalia is tired of Piotr constantly hustling because of their financial situation and is annoyed by the fact that they have not had a typical marriage ever since the wedding.
On the day of their anniversary, Natalia is furious at the choice of his gifts. Amidst all the growing hostility between the two, the couple buys a lottery ticket, and they win the prize money. Natalia always wanted to open a café and a studio for painters with her friend Agatha, while Piotr wanted to invest the money in real estate and buy themselves a home. Both have ideas that have begun to clash, and neither of them is willing to step away from their plans because both feel they have a right to the money. Agatha plants a seed of doubt in Natalia’s mind about Piotr trying to kill her to take control of the money. Piotr overhears his wife’s conversation about murdering him. This sets the plot in motion with the quest to find out who would die first. Will the couple finally talk about their crumbling marriage or go after the money for their survival?
The start of the movie is bizarre, and it gets weirder in the middle and at the end, only for the audience to end up being dumbfounded. There is nothing added for shock value, but the viewers surely will be upset with the way the film unfolds. The story and the screenplay do not make sense because, in the real world, you’d imagine a couple as bitter as Piotr and Natalia would have a talk with each other instead of going to their best friends for advice and suggestions about their crumbling marriage.
The story is also hypocritical at times. The contradiction in Natalia’s character is infuriating. As a wife, she could financially contribute and work towards a holiday she wanted instead of expecting her husband to do the heavy-duty work to salvage their marriage. Natalia works for an advertising agency, and she reprimands her boss for not giving her an account to work on because of her gender. This hypocrisy is blatant, and the makers probably forgot about it while writing it.
The comedy route taken by the makers does not land, and all the attempts they make on each others’ lives, intentional or not, are borderline problematic. The movie does not necessarily want to send a message, but the story and the screenplay are such that the engagement factor dies down quite early. There is no attempt made to make the film interesting. The climax is weird, and there is a disconnect between how the film began and how it ended. The director and the writer ended the film in a clunky fashion, and it ends up making us question why the makers took the strange route instead of giving the film a conclusive ending.
The screenplay is haphazard and all over the place, as the makers and writers couldn’t make this film believable. The lead characters are mean to each other, and they have not been given proper arcs. The only emotion driving them is anger and resentment. There is nothing that defines them as individuals, as they are seeking the prize money for themselves. It only obstructs the viewing experience. The writers could have explored their marriage instead of wasting the screenplay on the couple trying to kill each other. The screenplay is immature and paints a bad picture of the genre.
There is a subplot that involves Piotr and Natalia’s friends getting involved with each other romantically. It is yet another absurd addition to this film. It did not serve any purpose, and there is no depth given to it. The director tried to graft two distinct scenarios: a couple on the verge of breaking up and two individuals coming together unexpectedly. The idea is not developed convincingly.
The idea of releasing this film a day before Valentine’s Day would be to project the fact that marriages are not all made in heaven. Sometimes people who fall in love fall out of it as well. The story and the screenplay could explain this emotion only for a moment. Kill Me If You Dare and Gone Girl have a lot of similar qualities. The difference would be that it is difficult to decide if the couple in Kill Me If You Dare is in love or not. In Gone Girl, it is easy to conclude the wife’s feelings for her husband, whom she wanted to implicate. The screenplay of Kill Me If You Dare is a letdown for the reasons mentioned above. It stretches beyond a point to make the film long, even though the run time is a bare minimum. The subplot about Piotr’s boss, Dagmara, is introduced, but there is no definitive ending to that narrative, and it is never brought up later in the film.
The performances by the actors remained below par till the end of the film only because of inadequate writing and bad character development. Weronika Ksiazkiewicz as Natalia and Mateusz Banasiuk as Piotr, the couple in the film, were not convincing enough. There is hardly any chemistry between the two to understand how a loving marriage turns sour. Kill Me If You Dare would have been an easy-breezy watch if any effort was taken to make the film seem believable and watchable. It is not recommended.
