Given our present era’s domination by the top 0.001%, both financially and politically, a black comedy that empathizes with a guy whose sense of birthright entitlement spurs him to murder all the relatives that stand between him and a multi-billion dollar inheritance wouldn’t seem to have a lot of traction, but money is weird that way. In How to Make a Killing, we first meet the Pynchonian named Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) on death row the morning of his execution, where the first thing he does when the priest who comes to visit him for his last rites is complain about his last meal, specifically the cheesecake (“I asked for vanilla. They gave me chocolate”). He also professes not to need any spiritual preparation before he shuffles off, to which the priest replies, “Nothing to share?” Given that opening, Redfellow lets loose in the classic plot-as-flashback style to explain in detail what brought him to this sorry end.
He was born into a wealthy Long Island family, but his pregnant mother was unmarried and refused to get an abortion, and so she was disinherited and banished to the wilds of New Jersey where she attempted to raise Becket in the style he should have become accustomed to, albeit on a working person’s salary. His poor mother dies of cancer while he is an adolescent, and when the Redfellows refuse to even receive her corpse for burial in the family plot, young Becket, who is sent off to various foster homes, plots his revenge, convinced that he deserves the money his mother would have rightly inherited, because she always told him he deserved it. As it turns out, he is still in the chain of succession, but eighth in line. The script, a la its inspiration, the late 40s British comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, is thus a series of murders, some gruesome, some sloppy, and all intentionally played for laughs.
But the writer-director, John Patton Ford, adds more, mainly through the inclusion of a childhood crush who turns into Margaret Qualley and, understanding Becket’s homicidal quest, not only eggs him on but wants in on it. Further complications of a decidedly post-millennial sort involve Becket making a success out of a financial services job in spite of himself and falling in love with one of his victim’s widows. The twists are unsurprising but not unoriginal, and an appealingly light tone is maintained throughout the bloodshed and guilt-wracked voiceovers, making How to Make a Killing a reliable entertainment until the end, when Ford’s own conscience kicks in and he loses his nerve. I’m not sure if the denouement counts as a vindication or a cop-out.
The box office hit My Daughter Is a Zombie also qualifies as a black comedy, but since this is a South Korean production, the genre requires explanation for the uninitiated. The first half of the film’s undead-related horrors are presented in the kind of slapstick style that Korean directors have already perfected in gore-fests like Train to Busan, but they’re marinated a schmaltzy stew of family melodrama. Single dad Jung-hwan (Jo Jung-suk) dotes shamelessly on his punky 15-year-old daughter, Soo-ah (Choi Yoo-ri), so by the time the latter is bitten by a zombie brat while the pair is trying to escape the virus-ignited walking dead epidemic taking over their Seoul neighborhood, we’ve come to understand that Jung-hwan will do anything for his kid, even after the authorities declare that all infected must be killed and anyone who harbors one is subject to arrest.
The graphic novel on which the script is based addresses this problem with an idea that launches a hundred Rocky-like action montages. Jung-Hwan spirits his stricken daughter to his childhood home in a tiny fishing village and soon determines that her actual personhood not only survives inside the growling and writhing corpus, but that triggering certain memories seems to keep the virus from progressing. So he and his mother (the always reliable Lee Jung-eun) and childhood pal (the always overused Yoon Kyung-ho) try to train Soo-ah to not bite while feeding her stimuli to spark memories of better times, all the while keeping her condition a secret from others in the village, in particular Jung-hwan’s old sweetheart, Yeon-hwa (Cho Yeo-jeong), who is a self-styled zombie hunter, having lost her fiancee to the disease.
These various efforts make for some amusing set pieces, in particular a basketball game that Soo-ah is forced to participate in at school; and as with How to Make a Killing, the latter half is filled with unexpected turns that not only reveal interesting things about Jung-hwan’s relationship to his daughter but also the actual nature of this particular species of zombification. Actually, I could have used a bit less justification for everything that happens in the movie, not to mention a lot less sappy sentimentality. But these things literally come with the territory.
How to Make a Killing now playing in Tokyo at Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).
My Daughter Is a Zombie, in Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).
How to Make a Killing home page in Japanese
My Daughter Is a Zombie home page in Japanese
How to Make a Killing photo (c) 2026 Studiocanal S.A.S.
My Daughter Is a Zombie photo (c) 2025 Next Entertainment World & Studio N.
