Kill List. A man, a dog, and his will to yield a lump hammer. In this moribund world of northern contract killings, director Ben Wheatley plays a cruel game on his audience. He allows us a glimpse into the lives his characters have grown accustomed to – an awkward marriage of domestic normalcy and deranged brutality – only to upend it with a finale that pays little mind to what has gone before. The film is less an example of misdirection than it is an elaborate con. Wheatley does not seem to understand the difference.

If money can turn a good man bad, then lesser men can surely be driven to ugly cruelty. Jay once made a fated pilgrimage to Kiev. What happened there, no one will say. All we know is that he returned with a thousand yard stare that colours everything he does. Together with his wife and young son, he tries to paint a happy picture of friends and polite dinner parties, only for the mask to slip almost immediately. Snide comments about the dry meat presage a tablecloth torn asunder, guests and onlookers be damned. It is not a pretty sight. And yet, compared to a garage stocked with military-issue carbine rifles, such arguments seem almost like the warm embrace of possibility.

I do not believe there is anyone who has owned a gun that didn’t pray at least once for the opportunity to use it. It is our nature. Jay’s friend – perhaps his only one – allows him such a chance. A shadowy faction present the two friends with a Kill List and the kind of money you don’t easily turn down. Jay and Gal are men who know little else. Their domestic disharmony is a reflection of the nihilism shared by so many of those returning from war. The most fascinating moment of 2008′s The Hurt Locker was its juxtaposing the rush of front-line bomb disposal with the deadening task of having to choose from a hundred interchangeable breakfast cereals. When at first Kill List succeeds in that image, it threatens to continue a quite masterful year in British cinema.

Where the film comes unstuck is in setting its two leads on their bloody quest. There remains promise in the details: the way Jay’s wife books their hotels, or in the clothes neatly stacked and folded, the latest Andy McNab by their side. Bold title cards announce the targets: the Priest, the Librarian, the Minister. As they swing their sythe, an industrial soundtrack strikes dissonant chords that compliment violence surpassing even the film’s most tortured competition. Gal barks questions at delirious stooges while Jay readies his hammer. Skulls are clubbed in. Hands, broken and deformed. The first of their victims dies in an immaculate kill room to make Dexter proud; the last, in the knee-deep killing fields of the damned.

No explanation is given for their descent. To do so would only interrupt the horror; the unspeakable crimes, relayed one frame after another. It becomes tiresome not because the individual scenes are lacking in impact, but because they are almost indistinguishable. You remember a man beaten to death in his kitchen, and you remember the shotgun tour of a construction yard under cover of darkness. What you don’t remember is the rhyme or reason. They are just these individual snatches of brutality, offered for your viewing displeasure. When Jay and Gal arrive at their final target, the title card ominously reads ‘The Hunchback’. It is not altogether inaccurate.

For the longest time, the film seems to be building towards an ending, but not the one it delivers. For viewers with the will to do so, I wish them luck in clinging to a handful of enigmatic clues as evidence of some greater truth. Others will soberly conclude that an audience’s inability to draw anything but the broadest of connections represents not artistic flourish, but a fundamental failure to narrate. Of the film’s possible themes – morality, war, society – none stand up to scrutiny. There is nothing but hot air behind these puzzles. It is part survival horror, part impressionistic mood music. There are dead rabbits on the lawn, and a cat strung up by its tail. Any coherence it once had gives way to an ending reminiscent of ‘A Serbian Film’, which paired similar goals with grander achievements. Viewers will find much to alternately laugh at and be disappointed by. All will leave confused. Do not mistake such a feeling for profundity.