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# Kill List (2011) & Possessor (2020) or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Job
- URL: https://www.thesecondsurface.com/kill-list-2011-possessor-2020-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-my-job/
- Published: 2026-10-08T16:26:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T16:32:36.000Z
- Author: Timo Tolonen
- Tags: kill list, possessor, 2011, 2020, cronenberg, wheatley, 21st century

A double-bill guaranteed to ruin your day. Ben Wheatly & Brandon Cronenberg exploring people's violent alienation from themselves and others. 

If I had a penny for every film in which an assassin for hire is pushed to their violent mental, physical, and spiritual limits, escalating until they annihilate their own family and embrace their worst impulses, I'd have two pennies, which I know isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

These are effectively two stories where the anti-hero protagonist spends the run time burning their own heart out of their chest in order to embrace their chosen profession. Both are manipulated towards their ultimate fate: Jay in Kill List by a mysterious occult organisation, looking to recruit/indoctrinate him; Vos in Possessor by a mysterious corporate organisation, looking to improve her on-the-job performance. Both are arguably tricked into the final act of violence but there is still an argument to be made that Jay resist until after the act, while Vos makes an active choice to act.

I won't get into the details of either film (my letterboxd reviews will be available shortly for the usual plot summary and what I actually thought about the movies as a whole), but just want to talk about the last shot(s) of the films and the ultimate fate of the characters.

Both films end on a similar visual metaphor: an image of the face of the protagonist (see the header image of this article), changed by their experience forever, before a cut to the primary symbolic image of the film: a mounted butterfly in Possessor representing freedom and guilt, and in Kill List, a literal symbol representing the occult organisation who have been orchestrating everything.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/fd/e4fdd693-bef0-42a8-88b9-eaea16343ad4/content/images/2026/10/image-1.png)

Beyond the symbols themselves, both characters end up in the same place: having metaphorically and then literally destroyed their lives and families. The protagonists mirror one another in their embrace of their chosen fates: Jay passively accepts being crowned and inducted into the organisation that set him on this path, while Vos no longer expresses (nor feels) the guilt previously associated with the act of killing and mounting a butterfly as a child. 

The final horror comes not just from the actions and choices they've made (whether conscious and intentional, or manipulated and unintentional) but from the sense that this final act of family annihilation is a catharsis, an ironic perversion of the moral purification of the protagonist, leaving the audience in a dark pit of despair, because the anti-hero embraces rather than rejects the final corruption and becomes a worse person than when the story began. 

There's a history of characters in horror movies embracing the horror at the end: rather than delay, resist, or defeat evil, these movies end with an acquiescence to the evil, that leaves the audience feeling the horrific weight of that decision even as the main characters reach their own peace with their situation.

If you learn to love your job as an amoral assassin, you'll never truly work a day in your life.