How to Make a Killing (2026) Movie Review: Glen Powell's Roguish Charm Powers a Wickedly Sharp Satire of American Greed

How to Make a Killing is a 2026 comedy-drama-thriller written and directed by John Patton Ford, following his critically praised debut Emily the Criminal (2022). Produced by Blueprint Pictures and StudioCanal, and distributed in the United States by A24, the film stars Glen Powell as Becket Redfellow, with Margaret Qualley (Honey Don't! and Blue Moon), Jessica Henwick, Bill Camp, Zach Woods, Topher Grace, Ed Harris, Raff Law, Bianca Amato, and Sean Cameron Michael rounding out the ensemble. The story follows Becket, the illegitimate heir to a staggering fortune, who was raised in modest circumstances after his mother was disowned by her billionaire family. When circumstances align with opportunity, Becket embarks on a calculated campaign to eliminate the seven relatives standing between him and a $28 billion inheritance. The film opens in US theaters on February 20, 2026, with a UK release via StudioCanal on March 13, 2026.

Ford has made the ambitious choice to transplant the bones of Kind Hearts and Coronets, the revered 1949 British black comedy, into contemporary America, and the decision pays off more often than it stumbles. Where the original weaponized the icy, stratified world of English aristocracy, Ford's version finds equally fertile ground in modern wealth inequality, the myth of the American dream, and the quiet rot beneath dynastic money. This is a film that arrives at exactly the right cultural moment, when the gap between the extraordinarily wealthy and everyone else has become one of the defining anxieties of American life. Whether Ford fully capitalizes on that moment is the question that divides the film's reception, but there is no question that he has built something entertaining, often insightful, and anchored by one of Powell's best performances to date.

Story and Screenplay: A Clever Premise That Occasionally Outpaces Its Own Execution

Ford opens the film from its endpoint, with Becket narrating his entire story to a prison priest four hours before his scheduled execution. This framing device is simultaneously one of the screenplay's smartest and most limiting choices. On the smart side, it establishes tone immediately: we are watching a cautionary tale dressed in the clothes of a dark lark, and the gap between Becket's breezy narration and the grim circumstances of his telling creates a productive irony that runs throughout. On the limiting side, it removes virtually all suspense about the broad strokes of Becket's fate, meaning the film must generate its tension from character and execution rather than plot uncertainty. Ford mostly succeeds at this, though not always.

The screenplay builds its world with genuine wit and a Dickensian attention to backstory. Becket's mother, a teenage heiress who was expelled from the family estate for refusing to terminate her pregnancy, is rendered in extended flashback with enough warmth and specificity to make the injustice that shapes Becket's entire adult psychology feel earned rather than schematic. The Redfellow family members themselves are drawn as broadly satirical types: a performatively "bohemian" photographer who signs his notes as "the white Basquiat," a megachurch pastor with a samurai sword and a Relient K playlist, a finance bro whose death-by-drowning arrives before the audience has time to develop much investment. This is where the screenplay most clearly departs from its source material. Rather than having one actor play all the victims in a trick of theatrical economy, Ford distributes the roles across an ensemble, and while this choice foregrounds American individualism as its own satirical point, it also means several characters arrive and disappear too quickly to generate the comic momentum the premise promises.

The central romantic architecture is where Ford's script does its most nuanced work. The tug between Ruth, a schoolteacher who represents the possibility of contentment without wealth, and Julia, a femme fatale whose hunger for money mirrors and amplifies Becket's own, gives the film genuine dramatic stakes beneath its darkly comic surface. The screenplay's treatment of Becket's gradual moral corruption is handled with a layered intelligence that recalls the slow poison of antiheroes like Michael Corleone and Saul Goodman. The message, that money warps identity and turns legitimate grievance into something unrecognizable, is clear. Where the script occasionally overreaches is in stating that message too explicitly, reminding the audience of its thesis when it should trust them to feel it.

Acting and Characters: Powell Commands the Screen While a Strong Ensemble Supports From the Wings

Glen Powell (The Running Man) has been steadily building toward a performance like this one. His career has demonstrated a rare combination of movie-star magnetism and genuine character actor instincts, and Becket Redfellow gives him room to deploy both simultaneously. He plays Becket as a man whose charm is partly natural and partly weaponized, who uses his handsome face and easy manner the way a card sharp uses a smile: to put people at ease while the calculation runs quietly behind the eyes. The performance shifts convincingly from wide-eyed resentment to cold-blooded calculation to something approaching genuine anguish, all without ever losing the thread of Becket's fundamental likability. It is a difficult tonal balance and Powell walks it with assurance.

Margaret Qualley's Julia is the film's most purely pleasurable performance. Playing the role as a film noir femme fatale transplanted into the present, all calculated desire and gleaming amorality, Qualley brings a charge to every scene she inhabits that the film noticeably lacks in her absence. The chemistry between Qualley and Powell crackles with a tension that is simultaneously romantic and adversarial, and the screenplay wisely keeps Julia's true motivations slightly opaque throughout, allowing Qualley to modulate between genuine feeling and pure manipulation in ways that keep both the audience and Becket guessing. The film's one genuine frustration is that she is not in more of it. Bill Camp's Uncle Warren, positioned as the family member who complicates Becket's mission by simply being decent, brings the ensemble's most grounded and affecting performance. Camp finds real warmth in a character that could have functioned merely as a plot mechanism, and his scenes with Powell give the film its emotional ballast.

Among the supporting relatives, Zach Woods and Topher Grace (Buddy and The Waterfront) make the strongest impressions in limited time. Woods's Noah, a self-styled artistic genius whose condescension knows no ceiling, is genuinely funny in his brief appearance, while Grace commits fully to the absurdity of a megachurch pastor with samurai sword affectations. Both actors clearly understand they are playing heightened caricatures within a film that otherwise operates closer to noir realism, and both manage to make that tonal gap feel like part of the joke rather than a problem. Jessica Henwick's Ruth deserves more space than the script provides, but within her scenes she establishes a warmth and groundedness that makes Becket's choice between her and Julia feel like a genuine moral contest rather than a foregone conclusion.

Direction and Technical Aspects: Ford Brings Sleek Confidence to a Bigger Canvas

John Patton Ford demonstrated in Emily the Criminal that he could generate tension and moral complexity from minimal resources. How to Make a Killing represents a significant step up in scale, and Ford handles the transition with visible confidence. Cinematographer Todd Banhazl shoots the film with a gleaming, pristine quality that visually encodes the film's central argument: the surfaces of wealth are immaculate and the rot runs entirely beneath them. The Redfellow estate in particular is composed and lit with a Citizen Kane-adjacent grandeur that makes its emptiness all the more pointed when Becket finally stands inside it.

Ford's direction is characterized above all by economy. Scenes establish their situations quickly, extract what they need, and move on without indulgence. The episodic structure of the story, in which each murder constitutes a chapter in Becket's escalating scheme, could easily feel repetitive, and the fact that it mostly does not is a credit to Ford's pacing. The murders themselves are handled with a deliberate understatement that will satisfy viewers who want their black comedy dry and may frustrate those hoping for more visceral satisfaction. This is a film about the idea of killing more than the act of it, and the staging reflects that priority. A drowning, a darkroom explosion, a bee sting all arrive with a matter-of-fact casualness that is darkly funny precisely because of how little ceremony the film grants them.

The production design captures the layered reality of American wealth with a specificity that rewards attention. The contrast between Becket's modest Belleville origins and the opulent Long Island estate that represents his obsession is never underlined in obvious ways; it is simply present in every frame, in the difference between a man's clothing store suit and Redfellow casual wear, in the gap between a Staten Island apartment and a palatial mausoleum. Ford's visual storytelling trusts the audience to read these contrasts without narration, which makes the moments when the screenplay does over-explain its themes feel more jarring by comparison.

Trailer How to Make a Killing (2026)

Music and Atmosphere: Mosseri's Score Provides Propulsive Momentum Throughout

Emile Mosseri, whose previous work includes the quietly devastating scores for Minari and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, brings a very different energy to How to Make a Killing. His score is propulsive and kinetic, providing the film with forward momentum in its more episodic stretches and lending Becket's methodical progression through the Redfellow family tree the feeling of something between a heist and a countdown. The music understands that the film needs to be fun even when it is being dark, and Mosseri calibrates this balance with skill, never pushing the score so hard that it tips the tone toward campy excess.

The film's overall atmosphere is a careful construction of surfaces and undertones, bright and polished on top with something genuinely unsettling running beneath. The sound design reinforces this throughout, from the ambient grandeur of the Redfellow estate to the acoustic ordinariness of Becket's New Jersey life. Ford uses silence sparingly but effectively, particularly in the film's more intimate scenes between Becket and Ruth, where the absence of score allows the human dimension of the story to breathe. The result is a film that feels sleek and entertaining in real time while accumulating a kind of moral unease that lingers after the credits.

Strengths and Weaknesses

What works:

• Glen Powell delivers his best work since Hit Man, finding genuine depth beneath Becket's roguish surface and carrying the film's tonal complexity with ease.
• Margaret Qualley's Julia is a fully committed, wickedly entertaining femme fatale performance that elevates every scene she inhabits.
• Todd Banhazl's cinematography makes the aesthetics of wealth feel simultaneously seductive and hollow, reinforcing the film's thematic argument visually.
• Emile Mosseri's score keeps the episodic narrative propulsive and tonally engaged throughout.
• Bill Camp brings quiet emotional weight as Uncle Warren, providing the film's moral center without sentimentality.
• The framing device of Becket narrating from death row creates an effective irony that resonates throughout.
• The film's restrained, matter-of-fact approach to the murders produces a dry, distinctive comic register that sets it apart from louder genre contemporaries.

What doesn't work:

• Several supporting Redfellow relatives, notably Bianca Amato's Cassandra and Sean Cameron Michael's McArthur, are so briefly present they register as little more than names crossed off a list.
• The screenplay's tendency to state its themes explicitly undercuts the subtler, more effective ways the story demonstrates them.
• The tonal inconsistency between Qualley and Harris playing genuine noir gravity and Woods and Grace playing outright caricature is never fully resolved.
• Jessica Henwick's Ruth is underwritten relative to her importance in the story's moral architecture.
• The investigation subplot involving the detective who suspects Becket operates on a logic-free plane that strains credibility even within the film's heightened register.
• The satirical argument, while well-executed, covers territory that recent films and television have already mapped thoroughly, and How to Make a Killing does not always find a fresh angle on it.

Final Verdict: A Smartly Crafted Thriller That Earns Its Place in the Eat-the-Rich Canon

Rating: ★★★½☆ 3.5/5 stars

Viewers who will get the most from How to Make a Killing are fans of Glen Powell looking to see him operate at his ceiling, audiences drawn to the eat-the-rich genre who can tolerate a more understated comic register than something like Ready or Not or The Menu, and anyone with an appetite for stylish noir aesthetics combined with pointed social commentary. Fans of the original Kind Hearts and Coronets will find it an interesting, if imperfect, transposition that makes genuine observations about what changes and what stays troublingly the same when you move from 1949 English aristocracy to 2026 American dynastic wealth. The A24 context will set appropriate expectations: this is arthouse-adjacent mainstream cinema, smart and self-aware, with genuine craft at every level.

Those hoping for a savage, uncompromising takedown of the wealthy class in the tradition of Parasite or Succession will likely feel the film pulls its punches at crucial moments. The murders are too low-key for genre thrills, the satire too politely stated for genuine provocation, and the romantic subplot too conventional to carry the moral weight Ford assigns to it. But within its own more measured ambitions, the film works. Powell and Qualley together are a genuinely electric proposition, and Ford has made a film that is always watchable, often very funny, and sharper than it appears on first consideration. A film that, like its protagonist, knows exactly how charming it needs to be to get away with what it is doing.

How to Make a Killing opens in US theaters on February 20, 2026 (A24). UK theatrical release: March 13, 2026 (StudioCanal). Language: English. Runtime: 105 minutes. Rating: R.