Dollar $tore Killers puts the cut in cut-price thrills.

It opens like so many cautionary tales have before it: grainy footage, a shaky camera, and someone doing something unspeakable with an object that looks like it cost about 99c. But Dollar $tore Killers isn’t interested in indulging our rubbernecking instincts. It wants to dissect them, pixel by pixel.

We start in familiar lurid true crime territory: two masked killers livestreaming dollar-store deaths, pursued by a hungry documentarian who thinks he’s got a scoop. What we get is something far murkier. It wears the aesthetic of exploitation horror, but there’s a smirk behind the lens, and it isn’t coming from the killers. It’s coming from Ethan Wells.

Seth K Hale plays Ethan with the kind of self-conscious gravitas reserved for failed filmmakers who pivoted to YouTube because curation is easier than creation. His on-camera persona is all smarm and sincerity, while his off-camera moments, though rare, crack to reveal a man both seduced and appalled by the story he’s caught in. While Ethan centres the story on himself, he is joined by a largely silent accomplice in the form of his cameraman. In many ways, the filming style makes us, the audience, the cameraman and in doing so adds an uneasy complicity to our watching the events unfold on screen. Are we witnessing the events or enabling them?

The kills themselves are deliberately absurd, stitched together with items so mundane you’ll never walk through a Poundland again without a twinge of anxiety. The joke, if there is one, is on us for laughing. Dixie (Amelia Mahrie), unmasked in more ways than one, emerges as the driving force. Charismatic, articulate, and quietly chilling, she holds court in a way that Dax never quite manages. She’s the prophet; he’s the acolyte. They’re both, ultimately, sacrifices.

When Dixie tells Ethan, “Their perception is in your hands,” it lands like a manifesto and a warning. From that point, he pivots. No longer just chronicling, he starts shaping. He stitches motive to method: economic disenfranchisement, societal decay, corporate malfeasance. Whether it’s accurate or useful doesn’t matter. What matters is that it plays.

And Dollar $tore Killers knows it’s playing with fire. Its most compelling sequences aren’t the kills but the interrogations – not of the killers, but of Ethan himself. When the camera turns on him, when the line of questioning goes off script, he squirms. He wanted to be the narrator, not the subject. His discomfort is the film’s true tension point. Objectivity is a pose he can’t quite maintain, and his disingenuously pious, Jerry Springer-style “Final Thoughts” monologue only confirm that he’s learned precisely nothing.

The film only runs an hour, and that brevity does leave some ideas stated rather than explored. It’s heavy on implication and exposition, short on exploration, but that might be part of the point. In a media environment where attention is fractured and runtime is currency, spelling things out feels like a weary acknowledgement that the film itself is aware that it’s likely competing with multiple screens and fragmented attention; a sly meta-commentary on how modern audiences consume content while scrolling past stories.

There are some standout lines that linger: “You can’t get blood from a rock.”/ “Depends how hard you throw it.” Or the deliciously reflexive exchange: “Tell her what she wants to hear” / “No, tell me the truth.” Those two lines say more about Ethan and Dixie than a dozen cutaway interviews ever could.

The final impression isn’t of carnage but complicity. Ethan gets his documentary, gets his closing monologue, but not a moment of reckoning. It’s the ultimate critique of an ecosystem where recording replaces responsibility and editorial distance becomes a shield against moral consequence. Dollar $tore Killers doesn’t revel in the destruction. It curates it. Director Cleve Braddy and writer Anghus Houvouras have contrived to create a lo-fi rust belt Black Mirror, where humanity’s failings are not reflected in the polished chrome of high technology but in the tarnished hubcap of an abandoned car at the edge of town. It’s an analogue anthropological apocalypse cut and repackaged as discount online agitprop.

It doesn’t always land cleanly. It doesn’t want to. But for a film made with practical and thematic economy, it cuts sharper than many of its glossier cousins. If the ones the camera point at are monsters, what does that make the viewers?