"How to Make a Kiling" (2026)

“How to Make a Killing” (2026) is darkly funny in much the same way that “Kind Hearts and Coronets” (1949, the film which it loosely remakes) is darkly funny, but the two films are separated by more than style or era. They reveal two very different moral imaginations. The older film satirized the absurdities of class and aristocratic ambition. Murder was treated with elegance and wit because the film still assumed a stable moral universe underneath the comedy. Louis Mazzini knew he was doing evil even as he justified it. He believed sophistication could replace virtue. His crimes were intelligible precisely because the world around him still possessed recognizable moral structures, however hypocritical they may have been.

How to Make a Killing inhabits a colder world. Its characters do not rebel against moral order so much as drift through the absence of one. The film’s crimes emerge not from grand ambition but from boredom, selfishness, desperation, and the quiet conviction that personal happiness outranks everything else. Nobody seems especially shocked when ethical boundaries collapse because those boundaries already feel negotiable from the beginning. The murders are not the intrusion of evil into ordinary life. They are simply the logical next step in lives already hollowed out by self-interest.

That makes the film feel like a spiritual descendant to “Hit Man” (2023) another Glen Powell film. In that earlier story, Gary Johnson embraced the modern fantasy of expressive individualism, the belief that identity is not something received but something invented. Gary found liberation by becoming “Ron,” the confident and dangerous persona he created for himself. Yet the deeper irony of Hit Man was that the freedom Gary discovered required abandoning truthfulness, integrity, and eventually morality itself. Reinvention became a form of self-deception. The mask did not reveal Gary’s authentic self. It consumed him.

How to Make a Killing pushes that same worldview one step further. Becket no longer wrestles with reinvention because reinvention is already assumed. He moves through life treating morality itself as fluid and optional. His choices are guided less by truth than by appetite, convenience, and emotional impulse. If expressive individualism says, “Become whoever you wish to be,” then this film asks what happens after society fully embraces that creed. The answer is not flourishing but moral vacancy.

This vacancy appears everywhere in the film. Relationships feel transactional. Human beings become obstacles or opportunities rather than neighbors bearing the image of God. Money functions almost like a sacrament, promising escape, comfort, and self-determination. Even guilt feels thin and temporary, less a matter of conscience than of inconvenience. The film’s dark humor works precisely because nobody possesses the moral depth to recognize the horror of what they are becoming.

In this sense, the film reflects a broader cultural shift. “Kind Hearts and Coronets” emerged from a society still shaped by inherited structures, class expectations, and external moral norms. Its satire exposed the corruption hidden beneath respectability. Modern films like “How to Make a Killing” depict something different: not hypocrisy hiding beneath morality, but morality itself dissolving into preference. The modern self no longer asks, “What is right?” but “What works for me?” Evil becomes banal because the self has become sovereign.

Theologically, this is one of the unavoidable destinations of expressive individualism. Scripture presents freedom not as self-creation but as rightly ordered love under the authority of God. Human beings are not autonomous creatures constructing meaning from scratch. We are created beings who discover meaning in relation to our Creator and in sacrificial responsibility toward others. Once the self becomes ultimate, however, morality inevitably becomes unstable. Desire begins to overrule truth. Feelings outrank obligations. Other people become instruments in the pursuit of personal fulfillment.

That is why the world of “How to Make a Killing” feels so emotionally thin despite its humor. Becket chases freedom yet appears trapped within himself. He seeks happiness yet cannot escape emptiness. He removes moral boundaries in the hope of liberation only to discover that the loss of moral order also erodes meaning, trust, love, and ultimately even his own humanity. In the end, when he is acquitted of the murder he did not commit, there is a brief moment when it looks like he might get a second chance, having learned what really matters. Instead, he is trapped in the amoral morass he has constructed for himself.

Will audiences read it that way though? Unlike older moral satires, the film offers little sense that society remembers what it has lost. That may be the darkest joke of all.