‘They Will Kill You’ feels like an old-fashioned New York-set horror, centred on a high-rise New York hotel whose inhabitants, it turns out, simply refuse to die – and in true ‘Kill Bill’ fashion, the central character proves more than a match for them. There are shades too of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, with masked figures moving through shadowy spaces, harbouring all sorts of sinister motives. But for all that atmosphere, this is really a film about splatter: decapitations, stabbings and increasingly grotesque set pieces dominate.

At its core, there is also a more personal thread – like ‘Kill Bill’, it follows a woman, Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz), trying to reconnect with her past, in this case a daughter she once abandoned and now seeks to reclaim. In that sense it recalls something like Paul Schrader’s ‘Hardcore’, with a parent descending into a dangerous underworld. Here, that underworld takes the form of a private members’ club where the elite select their victims for ritual sacrifice, giving the film a slightly ‘Hostel’-like edge.

What’s striking is the strong female presence at the centre, particularly as events refuse to go according to plan. There’s an audacious idea underpinning it all – that this hotel is effectively a gateway to hell – but the film never really develops that concept in any meaningful way. Instead, it leans heavily on repetition, with characters, including those played by Heather Graham and Tom Felton, returning again and again in increasingly eye-popping ways (literally) because they simply cannot die.

For a supernatural fable, it all feels surprisingly thin. There are flashes of invention and excess, but very little depth beneath the surface, as when mere lip service is paid to the fact that each floor in the hotel is supposedly meant to represent a different ingredient of the seven deadly sins.