Give Nice Movies a Chance with ‘F Marry Kill’ [Review]
If you took the sensibilities of the 2014, white feminism Buzzfeed era and distilled that into cinematic form, I’m positive the result would Laura Murphy’s F Marry Kill. With a script credited to Ivan Diaz, Dan Scheinkman, and Meghan Brown, F Marry Kill is a Facebook meme of empowerment and online dating. With a touch of shallow true crime condemnation, of course. That it works at all is a credit to Lucy Hale, whose effervescence and knowing winks elevate incredulously dated threads. F Marry Kill is not marriage material, but you could do a lot worse for a one-night stand.
F Marry Kill, while billed as a horror comedy, is considerably more interested in the latter than the former. Despite opening with an off-screen kill of a young graduate student, F Marry Kill quickly devolves into an early 2010s digital dating comedy. You’d be mistaken, expository monologues aside, for thinking you were tuned into some CW pilot. Hale’s Eva Vaugh has just turned 30, and aggravating her aging woes is a recent breakup with her longtime partner, a local cop who was pretty regularly unfaithful.
Digital overlays serve as character introductions, spotlighting names, ages, and interests, a cue akin to, you guessed it, an online dating profile. Eva undergoes an Angel of the Morning awakening and creates an online profile, despite peripheral concerns about the Swipe Right killer targeting single women.
Hale has an absolute blast as the manic, paranoid, yet assuredly confident young woman entering the modern dating scene. Online dating, especially the intersections with violence and misogyny, has been better satirized elsewhere. Fresh was fresh, and Woman of the Hour astutely targeted the innate terror. F Marry Kill isn’t interested in some broader interrogation of modern gender roles or social dating expectations—insight stops and starts at “Hey, that random guy you’re sleeping with might be a serial killer.”
The thematic undercurrent is largely regressive and narratively unstable. Set in Boulder, Colorado, audiences must first accept that among the thousands of potential suitors, one of the three men Eva regularly sees must be the Swipe Right killer. It’s gags and hijinks as Eva shifts focus from one man to another, fingering them as the killer and having those suspicions dashed, only to have them reappear as F Marry Kill lumbers on.
Horror isn’t the point, and there’s little to no tension in Eva’s dating exploits. She’s never in any earnest danger, and efforts to possibly criticize true crime culture fall flat. Worse still, F Marry Kill almost seems to celebrate the paranoia augmented by true crime content. There’s no criticism of the hosts reveling in violent deaths, and characters whose lives are predicated around tracking the killer—string on a corkboard casually—are celebrated. It’s funny, but in terms of making any kind of genuine comment on the culture is lost.
Returning to Lucy Hale, she’s F Marry Kill’s savior, akin to Adam Brody in The Kid Detective. A strong performance that is so singularly cute and charming, weaker material remains consistently engaging. F Marry Kill was never boring, and Hale—appearing in every scene—is a huge reason why. I could watch her stumble through solving another dozen serial killings, and I don’t think I’d mind.
F Marry Kill’s regressive millennial politics are a mark against an otherwise endearing performance. In the era of true crime, not everything can be Red Rooms. F Marry Kill has nothing to say, and what little there is being shared is arguably problematic. It’s not worth marrying, but it doesn’t deserve to be killed either. The pleasure might last just five minutes, but there are worse Fs out there. Just ask the movie to leave right after.
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F Marry Kill (2025)
Summary
Laura Murphy’s F Marry Kill isn’t worth marrying, but you could do a lot worse for a one night stand.
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