Boy Kills World

Violent Content

So, Boy doesn’t kill the whole world. But between himself, his friends and his opposition, the body count here is fairly extraordinary. Dozens upon dozens of people meet their bloody ends—often due to a well-placed bullet and accompanied by a splash or (depending on the gauge and number of shots fired) explosion of blood. I won’t detail every casualty here, but I will mention some of the more notable ones.

One man—apparently high on something—continues to fight despite breaking a bone or two, having his jaw pulled from its hinges and, ultimately, losing a couple of limbs. One of those limbs, his arm, he rips off himself: Caught in a door of some kind, he twists his body free from the trapped appendage so he can keep fighting.

A guy has his skull crushed by a heavy bit of machinery. (We see the resulting mess.) A man has both his arm and foot severed before being executed. Someone gets skewered and killed by a camera boom. A handful of heads are cleaved from their bodies. We see a corpse hanging from a tree (along with a still-living person struggling to stay alive). A hatchet point lands in someone’s forehead, ultimately killing that person. A man has hooks placed in his mouth, with the intent clearly to rip the man’s face apart by the cheeks. The camera turns away from the scene, but someone who did see the act vomits messily.

Someone is perforated by point-blank blasts from a machine gun. Several people are dispatched via a huge sledgehammer. Someone is stabbed in the neck with a fake carrot. Knives slice throats. Swords skewer torsos. People are stabbed in the face. Necks are broken (as are plenty of other bones).

A number of vicious, grotesque wounds do damage before death (usually) follows. Several people, for instance, are ookily wounded with a hand grater. Someone is overcome by a giant pineapple. Unfortunate captives wear shock collars that are activated at crucial moments. A leg and arm are wincingly sliced, lengthwise. One person’s cheek is grotesquely cut.

In flashback, we see Boy’s mother and sister killed. While the shooting mostly takes place off screen, we repeatedly see Nina’s hand slip out of Boy’s own, indicating the moment of death. These and other scenes of violence perpetrated against children can be particularly difficult to watch—as can the anguished pleas for mercy from family members. We see how Boy loses his hearing: A red-hot poker is stuck into his ears.

Boy’s training was, by any standard, fairly abusive. We see him spar—painfully and close to lethally—with the shaman in flashback. The shaman also often buried Boy in mud, forcing him to lie underneath the dirt and breath through a bamboo tube. Boy is knocked back from the recoil of a gun he fires, and he’s knocked around by a rolling statue head. He tells the audience that the only real fun he had back in the day was from his “beetle fight club,” with the beetles named Gabe and Alphonso. Alas, Boy picks up the corpse of one, marking the end of said fight club.

We see the carcasses of what appear to be goats: A butcher slices out the tongue of one. People are thwacked in the genitals, and at least one man is shot there (the bullet going up through the body and out the skull). Boy discovers a body in a car trunk. There’s a crude reference to someone feeling “butt-hurt.”